The Chicago Blog

"Yes, we are all lost and wandering in the thick mists. We have no destinations. The city is without outlines. And the drift of figures is a meaningless thing. Figures that are going nowhere and coming from nowhere. A swarm of supernumeraries who are not in the play. Who saunter, dash, scurry, hesitate in search of a part in the play."

Ben Hecht (1894—1964) was a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Daily Journal and the Chicago Daily News as well as a playwright, novelist, short story writer, and scriptwriter.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Literature
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In January we announced the birth of the new series "South Asia Across the Disciplines"—a unique collaborative publication effort between Columbia University Press, the University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press designed to increase publication opportunities for emerging scholars in the field. We recently unveiled a new website for the project offering more details, including a formal call for submissions and a list of forthcoming publications at www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

According to the SAAD website:

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" publishes work that aims to raise innovative questions in the field. These include the relationship between South Asian studies and the disciplines; the conversation between past and present in South Asia; the history and nature of modernity, especially in relation to cultural change, political transformation, secularism and religion, and globalization. Above all, the series showcases monographs that strive to open up new archives, especially in South Asian languages, and suggest new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal. We invite manuscripts from art history, history, literary studies, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences, especially those that show an openness to disciplines other than their own.

As a collaboration among leading university presses, "South Asia Across the Disciplines" marks a new approach. Each book in the series is published under the imprint of one of the three presses, but all are promoted as part of the series, sharing in design, advertising, and publicity.

To find out more about this exciting new publication initiative from three of the academy's leading publishers, navigate to www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

Archived in Anthropology | History | Literature | Religion | UCP News
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First appearing in somewhat different form as a series of dispatches on McSweeney's Internet Tendency—an excellent literary site to add to your list of bookmarks—Philip Graham's new book The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon offers readers an exuberant yet introspective account of the author's year long sojourn in Lisbon with his family as they explore Portugal's music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture.

Recently, Graham was interviewed about his book on the Inside Higher Ed. blog, The Education of Oronte Chrum. Here's an interesting passage from the interview wherein Graham answers a question put to him about "writing other cultures" and the "dangers of misrepresentation":

I think the dangers of misrepresentation when describing a conversation you had five minutes ago with a family member or friend are high, too. Because the thoughts of others are unavailable to us, humans have to make do with varying skills of interpretation. We're all fiction writers of a sort, throughout our lives shaping characters out of the selected and often misleading signals we receive from the people we think we know. A spotty business at best, this. But what's the alternative except deepening isolation?

The same goes for travel, since every country on the globe shares a second, secret name of Pitfall. Yet sometimes where you live doesn't give you what you need or want or whatever you're secretly searching for, and when you find a place that does, that becomes the most rewarding travel, the kind where each footstep on the outside is accompanied by an echoing footstep within. These steps are necessarily tentative. In The Moon, Come to Earth, I tried to separate from myself any notion of being an expert. I was and remain simply your run-of-the-mill flawed fellow, awkwardly nosing about another culture, never quite sure what I might come upon, what might resonate inside me, attract or appall me.

Continue reading the full interview on The Education of Oronte Churm blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Literature
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If you saw just one episode of the PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea, or if you saw them all, you saw certain images repeatedly: brown bears catching salmon at Brooks Falls, a wolf loping across a meadow in Denali, bison lumbering through the snow of Hayden Valley, and Mt. McKinley rising to improbable heights above a cloud bank. These signature images are like a visual glue that Ken Burns used to hold together the multitude of places and people covered in the National Parks series.

These indelible character of these signature images, and all the magnificent images in the series, attest to the remarkable power that photographic images of natural scenery have to create a compelling story and and establish cognitive and emotional connections with the parks as well as with the people who have preserved them. The National Parks series becomes the latest in a long chain of photographic imagery, including the work of Ansel Adams and New Deal filmmakers, to picture nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.

This is the subject of a book we published a few years ago, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform by Finis Dunaway. He tells the story of how visual imagery shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. By examining the relationship between the camera and environmental politics through detailed studies of key artists and activists, Dunaway captures the emotional and spiritual meaning that became associated with the American landscape.

We have an excerpt from the book which discusses the role of coffee-table picture books, especially those published by the Sierra Club under the leadership of David Brower, in creating an environmental consciousness that protected natural areas across the country. One book, This is Dinosaur, played a significant role in the battle over damming the Green River in the area known as Echo Park, in Dinosaur National Monument—a story told in Episode Six of the series. This is Dinosaur, edited by Wallace Stegner, who first called the national parks "the best idea we ever had," was part of the successful campaign to galvanize public and Congressional opinion and defeat the Green River dam project.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
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Bright Star, the new film written and directed by Jane Campion, opened in the Chicago area yesterday. Bright Star weaves a story of the romantic love and poetic longing of John Keats and Fanny Brawne during the last three years of Keats' too-short life. Campion's script was, according to today's review in the Chicago Tribune, "inspired by the exceptional Andrew Motion biography Keats," which we published in paperback in 1999.

Motion's biography is an interesting choice for a filmmaker. Andrew Motion is a poet above all; he served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. He has numerous books of poetry to his credit, as well as criticism and several other biographies. Keats is a poet's biography of a poet; it is steeped in the words of the poet, shaped primarily by Keats' letters and punctuated by Keats' poems. It is as textual as you can get.

Keats has come down to us, Motion writes, as a poets' poet: the champion of truth and beauty, a sensualist, the archetype of the Romantic poet, who poured out words in a frenetic rush, writing all the poems we know him for in the space of a month or two. But Motion gives us another side of John Keats. Unlike previous biographers, he pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited—a young man, trying to climb up from his working class origins, shaped by radical political ideas as well as by notions of truth, beauty, and romantic love.

We have an excerpt from the book which discusses Keats, Fanny Brawne, and Keats' poem to her, "Bright Star."

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Literature | Poetry
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Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum offers a revealing look at the plundering of Iraq's cultural heritage during the Iraq war. Housing relics dating back to the dawn of human civilization some twelve thousand years ago, Iraq's National Museum as well as many important archeological sites were looted while, according to Rothfield, nearly everyone, including some of the highest ranking U.S. government officials, simply looked the other way. As Benjamin Moser writes his review for the September edition of Harper's magazine:

The destruction inevitable in wartime might have been mitigated if Iraq had not suffered the bad luck of being invaded by George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. One of the many low points of their low endeavor came when Rumsfeld (whose boundless self-regard was untethered to any reckonable aptitude) said that "stuff happens" in reply to early reports of widespread looting. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over," Rumsfeld scoffed, "and its the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you think 'M y goodness, were there that many vases?'"

This attitude, Rothfield shows, … even placed Rummy and his "war president" in unfavorable contrast with Saddam Hussein, who, during his invasion of Kuwait, took precautions to prevent the looting of the Kuwait Museum.… After Rumsfeld ignored repeated pleas to prevent the entirely foreseeable looting, disaster came: a full-scale destruction of countless monuments in the birthplace of civilization.

A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.

Pick up a copy of Harper's magazine to read the full review and in the meantime, read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Literature | Reviews
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We're used to seeing, usually in the New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee's frequent book reviews. And we have first-hand experience (pdf) of what a great job the Notices of the American Mathematical Society does with its book reviews section.

Still, it was a surprise to learn from the complete review that these two reliable patterns of the book reviewing world had combined in such an unexpected way. But perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising at all, because the book Coetzee reviews in the new issue of Notices (pdf) is all about a similar sort of well suited yet not wholly expected pair. About Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, Coetzee opines that "there are a priori grounds for thinking of poetry and mathematics together, as two rarefied forms of symbolic activity based on the power of the human mind to detect hidden analogies. In other words, an anthology like Strange Attractors, which brings together a hundred and fifty poems with some degree of mathematical content, makes more a priori sense than, say, a collection of famous speeches with some mathematical content."

Well worth reading for reasons beyond its novelty, the review (along with the small matter of that Nobel-winning oeuvre) reminds us for the nth time what a coup it is to have published books both by and about such a brilliant writer.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Poetry
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Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso both spoke today at the city's annual August 6 ceremony, held to mark the anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack, which on this day in 1945 decimated Hiroshima and killed or fatally harmed 140,000 people. In today's Daily Telegraph, columnist Kate Day compares the event to past August Sixths with a series of striking photographs that reflect the way the city has incorporated its tragic past into its modern landscape.

John Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero delves deep into that process, recounting controversial history of Japanese public discourse around Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a discourse alternatively celebrated and censored—from August 6, 1945, to the present day.

The first complete study of the nuclear theme in Japan's intellectual and artistic life, Writing Ground Zero covers works from the earliest survivor writers, including Hara Tamiki and Ota Yoko, as well as such intellectuals as Oe Kenzaburo and Oda Makoto. Outlining the Japanese contribution to ongoing international debates on ethics and history, it adds a rich context to Prime Minister Taro Aso's hope that, as he put it today, "Japan will … lead the international community toward the abolishment of nuclear weapons and lasting peace."

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History | Literature
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Sixty years ago today, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned.

One of those three survivors, Bob Sallee, will speak to the public this week in Montana as part of ceremonies held to observe the anniversary of the conflagration.

Sallee, of course, also figures prominently in Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, which hauntingly searches out and fits together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

In this evocative excerpt, Maclean reflects on how it was that of the crew only Rumsey and Sallee survived.

If you had known ahead of time that only two would survive, you probably never would have picked these two—they were first-year jumpers, this was the first fire they had ever jumped on, Sallee was one year younger than the minimum age, and around the base they were known as roommates who had a pretty good time for themselves. They both became big operators in the world of the woods and prairies, and part of this story will be to find them and ask them why they think they alone survived, but even if ultimately your answer or theirs seems incomplete, this seems a good place to start asking the question. In their statements soon after the fire, both say that the moment Dodge reversed the route of the crew they became alarmed, for, even if they couldn't see the fire, Dodge's order was to run from one. They reacted in seconds or less. They had been traveling at the end of the line because they were carrying unsheathed saws. When the head of the line started its switchback, Rumsey and Sallee left their positions at the end of the line, put on extra speed, and headed straight uphill, connecting with the front of the line to drop into it right behind Dodge.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Literature
Posted by MM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sixty years ago this August, a crew of fifteen of the Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned.

Bob Sallee, then just seventeen, was one of the survivors. In a new radio interview for American Public Media's The Story Sallee relates the harrowing tale of how he survived the blaze that raced up Mann Gulch. For years Sallee declined to talk about that day, until Norman Maclean—best known for authoring the classic story, A River Runs Through It—contacted Sallee in the course of research for Young Men and Fire.

Maclean, an English professor at the University of Chicago and a former wilderness firefighter, spent the final years of his life researching the story which, for him exemplified a moment when "life takes on the shape of art," whose "remembered remnants… are largely what we come to mean by life and become almost all of what we remember of ourselves."

Listen to the archived audio from Sallee's interview and see our website for Maclean, including an excerpt of the decisive moment of Young Men and Fire.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Literature
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As the imminent Fourth of July holiday ushers in the annual paeans to American independence and editorials about the importance of remembering its history, several momentous chapters in our national story—including the temporary misplacement of America, the unfreezing of the Earth, and the invention of the prairie dog—are once again missing from the familiar Independence Day narrative.

So it's a good thing that, just in time to correct these grievous oversights, we rediscovered in the vault Walter Blair's Tall Tale America, a classic of American humor that features as its chief historical figures not presidents, military leaders, and tycoons but folk heroes and popular characters such as Davy Crockett (and his pipe-smoking pet bear Death Hug), Old Stormalong, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry.

More traditional characters do make brief appearances: Blair briefly tells the story, for example, of when Thomas Jefferson "put on one of his oldest suits of clothes, just to show he was one of the folks.… walked from his boarding house through the mud up the hill to the brand new Senate chamber, and started to run the country." But the tall tales of "Daniel Boone's Discovery of Kentucky and His Other Puzzling Habits" and "Seaman Tom Smith's Theory about Dry Oceans"—not to mention their accompanying illustrations by John Sandford—are, if we may say so, much more interesting.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
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In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began an unprecedented project to reconstruct the palace of Knossos on Crete, but instead, as Cathy Gere demonstrates in her new book, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, created a complex of concrete buildings on the site owing at least as much to modernist architecture as to Bronze Age remains. As Tom Holland of the Times Literary Supplement writes: "the fabulously ancient palace of Knossos enjoys, as Gere points out in her arresting first sentence, 'the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island.'"

Gere shows how Evans' idiosyncratic reconstruction of the palace of Knossos was nevertheless successful at bringing ancient Greek legends to life and sparking the imaginations of a host of twentieth century artists and intellectuals. Influencing the likes of Joyce, Picasso, and Sigmund Freud to name a few, Evans' often fanciful vision of Cretan civilization, promulgated through the work of visionaries like these, had a profoundly transformative effect on the way Western culture viewed its past, as well as its future.

On Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 7:00 PM Gere is scheduled to make an appearance at Washington DC's Corcoran Gallery of Art to deliver a talk on the subject, examining how—based on Evans' work—European modernism reimagined ancient Cretean civilization in its own image, employing its creative reinterpretation of Cretan society as an early blueprint for twentieth century movements as disparate as fascism, pacifism, feminism and psychoanalysis.

For more about the book see Tom Holland's recent review for the TLS and another review from the May 14 edition of the Economist. For more details on Gere's lecture, navigate to Corcoran Gallery website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Events | History | Literature
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Let’s get this straight from the start: Bigfoot doesn’t exist. All the reported sightings are almost certainly either mistakes or hoaxes. At the same time, Bigfoot is America’s premier homegrown monster, a figure as familiar as—if far hairier than—Uncle Sam. And he remains big news: when two men from rural Georgia claimed last autumn that they’d killed a Bigfoot, reporters and camera crews flocked to their press conference, and more than 1,000 news stories followed worldwide.

Just what makes this shaggy beast so enduring? With Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Blu Buhs hacks his way through the forest of myths, mysteries, and pseudoscience surrounding Bigfoot to write a cultural history of this modern monster. Buhs begins his trek in the forests of nineteenth-century America, with tales of wildmen roaming the hills; he then travels to the Himalayas to come to grips (not literally) with the Abominable Snowman, then back to the late 1950s in northern California, where the contemporary creature first emerged as a media marvel. Along the way, we meet hunters and hucksters, charlatans and serious seekers, as Buhs travels the back roads of America in an attempt to understand Bigfoot’’s hold on our imagination. Just what does all the ensuing cryptozoology and craziness say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, and the media?

Though Buhs always keeps his skeptic’s eye open, he writes with an enthusiast’s deep love for his subject; the result is a biography of Bigfoot that will leave other hunters following its footprints for years to come.

Read the press release.

Also, see an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History | Literature | Press Releases
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Now Available in Paperback— This Wide and Universal Theater explores how Shakespeare’s plays were produced both in his own time and in succeeding centuries. David Bevington brings Shakespeare’s original stagings to life, explaining how the Elizabethan playhouse conveyed a sense of place using minimal scenery, from the Forest of Arden in As You Like It to the tavern in Henry IV, Part I. Moving beyond Shakespeare’s lifetime, Bevington shows the lengths to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century companies went to produce spectacular effects. To bring the book into the present, Bevington considers recent productions on both stage and screen, when character and language have taken precedence over spectacle. This volume brings a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare’s art.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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The last issue of the Chicago Reader contains a special section on new Spring books with a couple of interesting articles profiling Asian American writers and their new works, including the latest from novelist and poet Ha Jin. The Writer as Migrant is a collection of three interconnected essays that draw both on his own experiences as a Chinese immigrant living in the U.S., as well as the writing of other famous literary exiles, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, and Joseph Conrad, to illustrate the unique obstacles and opportunities that face those writing in a foreign language, and in a foreign land. The Reader article focuses on Jin's personal struggles between feelings of alienation from his native Chinese language and culture, and the greater intellectual freedoms he has experienced writing in the U.S.:

When he started writing, Jin says, "I viewed myself as a Chinese writer who would write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese." But how could he write on behalf of a people if he couldn't also address them? Since his books often deal with the politics of modern China—his first volume of poems, Between Silences: A Voice From China, is based on his experiences in the Chinese army—most of them haven't been published there. One exception is Waiting, his best-known and least political novel—and even that's been condemned by some as anti-China.

Of course, had he returned to China he could have written in Chinese. Then again, he might not be writing at all. Jin thinks he'd have become a translator or critic or maybe a professor, but wouldn't have written much. When he was starting out in the U.S., he says, writing was a matter of survival: he was on the tenure track at Emory and had to publish to keep his job. But writing in English offers another sort of survival as well. It's "a way for me to do meaningful work in a language that's not controlled by authorities. In that way it's a matter of artistic survival."

So he writes in English, even though he argues in the book's second essay, "The Language of Betrayal," that "no matter how the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue.…"

Read the rest of the article online at the Chicago Reader website.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
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"Whereas, on his 445th birthday this April 23, Shakespeare still speaks to the people of Chicago through timeless words and works," Mayor Daley proclaimed Thursday "to be Talk Like Shakespeare Day in Chicago"—much to the manifest delight of pun-loving reporters and headline writers across the country.

But while the linguistic dexterity that gives us Da Bard is praiseworthy, it's even more impressive to be able to pronounce Shakespeare's lexicon correctly. That's where Shakespearean voice and text coach Gary Logan comes in.

In a book that was destined to have been published by a press whose hometown would eventually beget Talk Like Shakespeare Day, Logan aims to untie tongues and help anyone speak Shakespeare's language with ease. The Eloquent Shakespeare includes more than 17,500 entries, making it the most comprehensive pronunciation guide to Shakespeare's words—and the best possible preparation for this Thursday in Chicago.

Archived in Literature | Reference and Writing
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In one of the many articles that have appeared recently about higher education during the recession—covering everything from increased applications to the reshuffled popularity of different fields—Slate asks whether advanced education really pays off during times like these. Laurel, one of the many students whose experiences the article cites in formulating an answer, has a familiar story:

"Many of the academic jobs that I applied to were cancelled," Laurel writes. "I've been scouring Craigslist but thus far I haven't found a position that requests familiarity with obscure art historical literature from the 18th century written in Serbo-Croatian.… I am hurdling toward being the saddest type of graduate student—the one who has finished and is at a loss for what to do next. I'm going to be the one sitting on the front steps of that Ivory Tower with my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands just begging to be let back in."

But Laurel has other options, as Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius point out in "So What Are You Going to Do with That?"—which explains why the paths leading away from the Ivory Tower can be just as rewarding for the tens of thousands of Ph.D.'s and M.A.'s who leave grad school every year. Designed for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world—whether by choice or necessity—"So What Are You Going to Do with That?" covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate.

And that's a skill whose value any new graduate can appreciate.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
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For the past eight years the term "intellectual" has been frequently interpreted by the media as a piece of anti-populist or elitist rhetoric. But in a recent article for the New Republic Ross Posnock notes that Obama's presidency has rehabilitated the term as one of praise rather than opprobrium, and with it interest in the history of black intellectualism in America. Tapping into this renewed interest, Posnock cites Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's new book, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher for its revealing look at the life and thought of its highly influential, yet often neglected subject.

Inheriting the role of the leading spokesperson for black intellectualism from such figures as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Boise, the authors show how Alain L. Locke both continued their legacy of leadership but also vitally updated the role. Posnock writes: Harris and Molesworth's book "brings alive [Locke's] distinctive fashioning of the role of black intellectual" demonstrating his unique ability to operate as "a race man," but also as "an apolitical aesthete," keeping "up the pressure on both roles, as his thought continually refined itself and deepened." Thus, expanding the influence of black intellectuals in American culture Harris and Molesworth deliver fascinating evidence of Locke's profound impact as the "father of the Harlem Renaissance," promoting and sparring with such diverse figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey among others.

To find out more about Locke's unique and important contributions to American culture read Posnock's article at the New Republic website, then pick up a copy of Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
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Writer Philip Connors reviews The Norman Maclean Reader in the March 30 issue of The Nation. Connors, who acknowledges that his life has certain similarities with Maclean's, recounts Maclean's life and literary works: the one book published in his lifetime (A River Runs Through It and Other Stories) and another published posthumously (Young Men and Fire).

"His career," writes Connors, "is one of the strangest in American letters." He relates some of the memorable moments of Maclean's publishing history, including the letter he wrote to a publisher who was trying to court the writer after the publication of A River Runs Through It. Connors continues:

It's not as if Maclean didn't know his stories were strange. He often said he wrote them in part so the world would know of what artistry men and women were capable in the woods of his youth, before helicopters and chain saws rendered obsolete the ancient skills of packing with mules and felling trees with crosscut saws. Artistry, specifically artistry with one's hands, was for him among life's most refined achievements.

Read the whole review; there are some interesting reflections on the religious resonances of Maclean's works.

We have a website for Norman Maclean.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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We have a winner. The National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of their 2008 awards today and we are happy to congratulate Seth Lerer on his win in the criticism category for Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

A few days ago NBCC board member Carlin Romano described, in a posting to Critical Mass, the achievements of the book and the fairy-tale-like spell it cast on the committee:

Lerer brought to his subject both the critical acuity and unlimited openness it deserved. He insisted on placing a complex literature within the history of childhood, a story both contested and blessedly clear. He took into account the cavalcade of publishing history, without permitting it to trample the imaginative "transformations" wrought by the books. He understood that his terrain included not just books written for children, but books read by them, driving home the critical spine signaled by his subtitle.

Lerer accomplished much else in his fairy-tale feat of levitating a University of Chicago Press study, despite its small type, to a possible national prize from critics beleaguered by eye strain.… Members of the NBCC Board swallowed whole this splendid meditation on the literature that changes us most, and lived happily ever after.

Our warmest congratulations to Seth Lerer.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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Offering a tale of passion, vivacity, and beauty appropriate for some Valentines weekend reading, Shirley Hazzard's new book The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples eloquently recounts the author's love affair with a city, which, ironically, has recently gained more notoriety for the proliferation of both its crime, and its trash. But as reviewer Judith Martin notes in her article for this Sunday's NYT Book Review, while acknowledging the city's more contemporary conundrums, Hazzard's insight into Naples' rich history and culture is more than enough to redeem its romantic soul. From Martin's review:

Shirley Hazzard, the noted Australian writer, lives in New York but has spent long stretches of time in a house on Capri. She counts herself as one of the few living Anglo-Americans with a lifelong crush on Naples, rather than the usual Italian cities: Florence, Rome or (as in my case) Venice. In Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, she writes poetically about the lure of an intimate daily relationship with the architectural remains of Naples many rich historical epochs.…

She loves visiting other centuries, a lure that every history-hungry traveler will recognize, and beautifully describes the wonders strewn everywhere about the region. Her sense of the presence of past visitors like Augustus Caesar, Goethe, and Lord Byron should resonate with any lover of Italy.

See this Sunday's New York Times to read the complete review, also read the introduction to the book, "Italian Hours."

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
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The New York Times reports today that intellectual historian and author John Patrick Diggins passed away Wednesday in Manhattan at the age of 73. Diggins—whose scholarly work encompassed the breadth of American political thought from "the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the present day"—was known for his "provocative, revisionist approach to the history of the American left and right." The NYT notes that "he nourished a sneaking fondness for the Lyrical Left but declared Ronald Reagan to be 'one of the two or three truly great presidents in history.'" The NYT article continues: "The tension between liberal ideals, pragmatism and authority ran like a leitmotif through books like The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundation of Liberalism, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority and Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy"—all of which the University of Chicago Press is honored to have published.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Literature | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some news of note from all around the world wide web:

Over at ReadySteadyBook, Sharon Cameron's Impersonality: Seven Essays has been selected as a book of the month for January.

After the New Yorker's Book Bench blog posted on Guy P. Raffa's Danteworlds:A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, the Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy blog picked up on the thread. All of this excitement comes as the Press prepares to issue Raffa's The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy in June.

Elsewhere on the blogosphere, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher is subjected to the page 99 test.

Ann Southworth, author of Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition has been guest-blogging about her book this week on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

The twelve books of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell collectively occupied spot number 32 on the Telegraph's list of 100 novels everyone should read.

And finally, in the wake of the Obama inauguration, suggestions for books to occupy the coveted space on the new President's bedside table have been circulating. In Washington Monthly, Andrew J. Bacevich recommends more from Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Obama has called "one of my favorite philosophers" and singles out our Irony of American History as "one volume that deserves a careful second reading."

Archived in Literature | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by SXH at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The National Book Critics Circle announced the nominees for its 2008 awards on Saturday. We were pleased that Seth Lerer's recent Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter is a finalist for this year's award in criticism. Offering insightful analyses of everything from Aesop's fables to Harry Potter, Lerer's book captures the rich and diverse history of children's literature in its full panorama, examining both the factors that have shaped children's literature, and how children's literature has, in turn, shaped us.

When we contacted Lerer about his nomination, he noted that since he dedicated the book to his mother, he would dedicate this honor to her as well: "She read to me, and took me to the library. There's a little vignette in the book about her taking me to the library; it's in the chapter on American libraries and American literature—the section on Johnny Tremaine."

To see the complete list of the NBCC nominees go to the NBCC Board of Directors blog. The winners will be announced on Thursday, March 12, 2009, at a ceremony held at the New School in New York.

You can read an excerpt from Children's Literature.

Archived in Awards | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Each day is another deadline. Then there is that ultimate deadline at the end of our lives. Our sense of the passage of time, and how our experience is shaped by the complexities of multiple deadlines, is the subject of Harald Weinrich's book, On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines. John Gilbey reviewed the book for the Times Higher Education:

Any tome that starts with a discussion of Hippocrates, Socrates, and Plato and ends with an analysis of the 1998 film Run Lola Run has to be worthy of closer study. This one does not disappoint.

Weinrich gives himself a very broad canvas—the impact that shortness of time has had on humanity across history—and he fills it well. He uses an unhurried, easy, and assured narrative style to tease out the complex nature of how we perceive time in natural and contrived situations.

Gilbey goes so far as to venture:

I believe that the structure and style of this book would lend itself well to being adapted for the screen, either as a single banquet or as a selection of very tasty snacks. If there is anyone out there looking to produce a high-quality, slightly quirky philosophical programme with a recognisably European flavour, then I strongly suggest that you take a look at this book and seek to secure the rights.

Rights of course can be sought through our Rights Department.

Conveniently, Times Higher Education served up quite a spread of Chicago books in their latest issue. The repast also includes:
Margaret Linley reviews The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910
Howard Segal reviews Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America
Peter J. Smith reviews Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness
and Caroline Bruzelius reviews Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals

Archived in History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by DB at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Otter, author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 is today's guest on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. On the program Otter joins host Laurie Taylor and Lynda Nead, Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, to discuss the political and social changes brought about in 19th century Britain by the use of gas lighting. Tune in at the Thinking Allowed website after the live broadcast, or find out more about Otter's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Literature | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since yesterday, when the National Endowment for the Arts announced the results of its latest study of national reading habits, scores of articles have appeared to report on its findings that "for the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature"—a great leap forward from the portrait of our habits painted by the NEA's last study, in 2002, which found that reading was "in crisis."

Amid the flood of ink spilled over this apparently dramatic shift, David Ulin's column in today's Los Angeles Times stands out as particularly nuanced. "I'm not so sure reading really was in crisis—any more than it ever has been," he writes, arguing that while he's "glad that reading also seems to be on the upswing," the NEA's report might not paint the fullest picture possible of Americans' literary lives.

Ulin points out, for example, that though the NEA for the first time included online reading habits in its survey, "nonfiction was left out of the loop.… That puts the works of David McCullough, Joseph Mitchell, Patricia Hampl and a lot of other authors into the 'not literature' category and out of the picture."

Without wading into the debate over what counts and does not count as Literature, we might suggest that if you're one of the many Americans who's been reading more fiction lately, you might also enjoy sparkling literary nonfiction by the likes of Lawrence Weschler, Greg Bottoms, Adam Biro, Shirley Hazzard, and Erin Hogan. (In addition, of course, to the fiction of Norman Maclean and Lee Siegel.)

If you're not sure where to start—or if you simply prefer to read online—allow us to point you toward excerpts of Hogan's Spiral Jetta, Biro's One Must Also Be Hungarian, and Siegel's newest novel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man.

Archived in Commentary | Fiction | Literature
Posted by MM at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his post yesterday on the arts blog, The Arts Fuse, Bill Marx links to a recent interview he conducted with novelist and poet Ha Jin for Public Radio International's World Books podcast. In the interview, Marx engages Jin in a discussion on the topic of the author's most recent book, The Writer as Migrant.

Marx writes:

The Writer as Migrant looks at the different ways writers have dealt with geographic displacement, from Joseph Conrad and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to V. S. Naipaul. In our conversation, Jin talks about the personal discoveries he made while writing the book, as well as his belief that history is best understood through fiction.

Navigate to the website of PRI's The World to listen and navigate to the press's website to find out more about the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, Guy P. Raffa decoded Dante's epic poem for a new generation of readers. And with the forthcoming The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy Raffa has expanded his project to encompass the entire text, through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—and into cyberspace. As the New Yorker's Vicky Raab notes in a recent article, Raffa's online version of Danteworlds offers "an integrated multimedia journey" through Dante's Divine Comedy, perfectly marrying medium with message to launch the reader "right into the allegorical action, heightening rather than dulling appreciation and comprehension." Raab continues:

Canto by canto, as Virgil and then Beatrice lead the benighted Dante through "circles of Hell, terraces of Purgatory, spheres of Paradise," so the clear-eyed Guy P. Raffa, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin who conceived and developed the site, leads students in Dante's steps, urging them to click on regions within each realm. I go straight to Circle Nine, of course, the lowest depths of the Inferno, peopled by the grisliest creatures: the giants Nimrod, Ephialtes, and Antaeus, the cannibalistic Ugolino, who eats the back of Ruggiero's head, "so that one head to the other was a hat," and, of course, the supersized, winged, tri-colored Beelzebub.

Continue reading Raab's article on the New Yorker website, or navigate to http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/ and check out the cyber version of Danteworlds for yourself.

Archived in Literature | Medieval and Renaissance | Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing, was the featured guest for a call-in session this Monday on NPR's Talk of the Nation. In the show, Davies discusses his unusual passion for collecting, and what's even more unusual, his passion for collecting items that most would consider junk. Davies describes his habit as a way of coping with difficulties in his life and a profound meditation on how and why we value things the way we do—and listening to the callers describe their own peculiar collections, apparently he's not the only one. Listen to King's radio appearance, and read an excerpt from his book on the NPR website.

Also, read another excerpt and an essay by the author on the press's site.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature, delivered his Nobel Lecture on December 7th at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm. Navigate to www.Nobelprize.org to view video from the lecture (French language only) or download an English translation in PDF. The lecture begins:

Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection. If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write—and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy—I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war.

The site also features a variety of other media including an interview with Le Clézio , a video clip of the author reading from one of his novels, and a photo gallery.

In 1993 the Press published Le Clézio's The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations, translated into English by Teresa Lavendar Fagan. Le Clézio's haunting book takes its readers deep into the religion of the Aztecs, powerfully evoking the dreams that made and unmade their ancient culture.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In early December, the Village Voice asked a panel of literary heavyweights (Ethan Hawke notwithstanding) to opine on their favorite obscure book. Robert Pinsky's selection was a book called Caelica from "the greatest poet unknown to many readers," Fulke Greville. In addition to being, as Pinsky notes, "an upper-class Englishman with a funny name," (or, in your correspondent's humble opinion, a moniker ripe for filching by a newly-formed indie rock band) Greville (1554–1628) was an important member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics.

Pinsky, who, in addition to his many and varied achievements, including a stint as United States poet laureate and a cameo on The Simpsons, is a University of Chicago Press author (his Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town will be published this Spring), will undoubtedly be delighted to know Greville may find his elusive audience at last. In April, the Press will publish in paperback The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited and with an introduction by Thom Gunn and a new afterword by Bradin Cormack, which includes the whole of the lyric sequence, Caelica. Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Gunn's selection of Greville's short poems, along with choruses from some of Greville's verse dramas, and his thoughtful introduction to the poet is an event of the first order that is certain to rescue Greville from the ranks of the obscure.

There's more Gunn on our spring list, as well. At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, edited by Joshua Weiner, brings together essays (including one from Pinsky) that explore Gunn's pressure on the boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic, in both his life and his work. And in our Phoenix Poets, Randall Mann imagines Breakfast with Thom Gunn.

Whether you are seeking an overlooked sixteenth century bard or a twentieth-century gay literary icon, our Spring list will satisfy all.

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Poetry
Posted by SXH at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're living in the northern U.S. it is likely that your garden is presently covered under several inches of snow, but as a recent article in the New York Times demonstrates, through the long winter months many gardeners never cease thinking about them. Writing for yesterday's "Sunday Book Review" Dominique Browning offers a list of a few of her favorite gardening books for midwinter reading that includes Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Browning writes:

The year's most thought-provoking, original and weighty garden book (though the lightest in heft) is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. Here the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and The Dominion of the Dead, a book about cemeteries and burial practices, turns his thoughts to the garden as "sanctuary of repose." Making a garden fulfills, as Harrison puts it, "a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need." Burrowing into a more refined issue than what makes a garden, he meditates on why we garden. It's impossible to summarize the answer, overflowing as his book is with eccentric connections and voracious readings, ranging over centuries and across continents. Part of what makes it exciting is the way Harrison sets up surprise encounters with unexpected writers, who spring up as though self-seeded among the perennials. Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?…

Reading Harrison's book is like strolling down a path through a well cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland. There's no point of arrival, though there may be resting places here and there. Just as in the making of a garden, there's no end to the wonder; the journey is everything. You don't have to be a gardener to love this book, but by the end you'll be asking yourself why on earth you aren't.

Read the rest of the review on the NYT website.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | History | Literature | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his November 30th review for the L. A. Times critic Art Winslow delivers an insightful assessment of the Norman Maclean Reader, which includes both previously unpublished Maclean material as well as selections from his two published works. The Reader, Winslow writes, offers Maclean fans invaluable insight into the author's life and works and exposes the deeply tragic themes that underlie them both.

There is a river that runs through Maclean's work, a strong and dark current of defeat, and if we needed further proof of that, both from his self-testimony and as evidenced in previously unpublished writing, it has arrived in the form of The Norman Maclean Reader.

Those who have read Young Men and Fire, Maclean's nonfiction reconstruction of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana, in which 13 smokejumpers were burned to death, may recall the multiple parallels Maclean drew between their fate and that of the 7th Cavalry troops under George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, another death-dealing Montana site.… The surprise here is to learn that the Custer comparisons were hardly incidental: From 1959 to 1963, primarily, Maclean struggled to write a book about the battle of the Little Bighorn and its cultural afterlife, and The Norman Maclean Reader presents five heretofore unpublished extracts from his manuscript, including sections of what was to be his conclusion, titled "Shrine to Defeat".…

[In both works] Maclean's attempt to construct a narrative in tragic form, in accordance with Aristotelian ideas, can be seen as underpinning… his [writing].

Continue reading "Defeat runs through it" »

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We were pleased to note this morning that Lennard J. Davis's new book, Obsession: A History is the frontpage story in this week's Chicago Reader. The article by the Reader's Deanna Isaacs focuses both on Davis himself and on the way his book complicates the common notion of obsession as a medical disorder, demonstrating that it's actually much more prevalent in modern society than one might guess:

We live in an age of obsession, some of us sick with it and some of us wildly successful because of it. If you ran the appointed number of miles for your workout this morning, took all your supplements, read the papers, perused all the necessary Web sites, and are planning to put in a focused, 10- or 12-hour day on the job, you're headed down the culturally approved obsessive path to reward.

If, on the other hand, you're mopping your kitchen floor ten times a day or heading to the sink for your 80th hand-washing, hoarding every plastic bag you ever got at Jewel, and lying awake at night counting the lights in neighboring buildings, someone close to you is probably suggesting that you see a doctor, get a diagnosis, and take a pill to fix your obvious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Never mind that the guy writing the prescription is just as obsessed as you are. He's on the right side of our cultural fixation and you're not.

That's the argument in Obsession: A History, UIC professor Lennard J. Davis's study of the rise and bifurcated path of obsessive behavior as both an illness and an ideal in the modern world.… He says that in our culture it's not only common but highly desirable to be a little nuts, as long as the craziness takes the form of obsession—the "singular attention to a particular thing" that our highly specialized jobs, electronically connected environment, and extreme hobbies demand.

Pick up a copy of the Reader for the complete article or find it online here. Also read an interview with the author and listen to Davis on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Literature | Psychology
Posted by TXM at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Graydon Carter, in his review of the new book honoring George Plimpton that led the Sunday Times Book Review, began with musings about a rather different book: "It can reasonably be said that A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s monumental 12-part novel about English manners, society, politics and power, still begs for an American counterpart. Lush and majestic, the book traces the years from 1921 to 1974—pretty much the period we like to romanticize as 'the American century.'” Carter goes on to posit that Plimpton's life may be the American analog to Powell's novels. But if you wish to fact check Carter's theory, we want to remind you that the University of Chicago Press is the place to go for all your Dance lessons.

Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.

The 12-novel cycle is available in four volumes: the first movement consists of the the novels A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World ; the second movement At Lady Molly's, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, and The Kindly Ones ; the third The Valley of Bones, The Soldier's Art, and The Military Philosophers; and finally, in the fourth movement, Books Do Furnish a Room, Temporary Kings, and Hearing Secret Harmonies.

And if after 3013 pages of Powell you are hungry for more, allow UCP to sate your desire with The Fisher King: A Novel, Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, and Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946-1990.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
Posted by SXH at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a fairly common experience: before you visit a place, you read up on it, study its history and culture, plan ahead and prepare … and then when you get there, you realize that no amount of study could have prepared you for the reality that confronts you, the glorious surprises of travel at its best.

But what happens when a true scholar, with peerless knowledge of a place and its people, arrives for a lengthy visit in a place he's studied for decades? Well, if he's as open and alive to wonder as David Shulman, the result is a travel diary like no other. Spring, Heat, Rains chronicles a seven-month sojourn in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, marrying Shulman's lifetime of learning with his joyful astonishment at the details of daily life in one of the world's most ancient societies. With Shulman, author of the critically acclaimed Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, as our guide, we meet betel-nut vendors, hear singers and epic poets, and clamber over ancient temples. We endure the crippling heat of summer and the desperately desired—but frustratingly inescapable—monsoon rains that follow. And we fall deeply, completely in love with an unforgettable place and the life of its people. Lyrical and lush, Spring, Heat, Rains will enchant anyone who has ever dreamed of India.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's Washington Post story about Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America chronicles the emergence as "a major player on the Hill" of the first nonpartisan organization dedicated to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The veterans' group might not have the budget or membership or fancy clients of some of the lobbying shops that line K Street," the Post notes. "But its leaders, most of whom are younger than 30, are keenly aware of the problems their unique constituency faces—post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, repeated tours—a fact that has helped the fledgling nonprofit group become a powerful voice for the 1.8 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan on this Veterans Day."

For those of us who don't work on Capitol Hill, Operation Homecoming tells the stories of those same veterans, in their own words. Called "the honest voice of war" by Jeff Shaara, this volume is the result of an initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into the extraordinary lives of soldiers and veterans.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, "One of the chanted mantras of our time is, 'But I support the troops.' Terrific. Now read Operation Homecoming to find out who they are, what they think, feel, want, have learned, won and lost in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an interesting review of The Writer as Migrant—the latest book from award winning poet, novelist, and Chinese expat, Ha Jin. Consisting of a series of essays that explore the significance of writing outside of one's homeland and in a foreign language, the book focuses not only on the author's own experience but also considers those of other famous exiles—like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang—examining how each grapples "with issues of identity and tradition," and their capacity to act as sounding boards for the voices of their native countries. From the review:

In the preface to Between Silences, his first book of poetry, published in 1990, Ha Jin proclaimed that he spoke for those who suffered and endured, those fooled or ruined by history—a Chinese writer who wrote in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese.

Nearly two decades later, Jin says that he has come to see the "silliness of that ambition.…"

"[T]oo much sincerity is a dangerous thing. It can overheat one's brain," he drolly notes in his compelling new collection of essays, The Writer as Migrant.…

"Just as a creative writer should aspire to be not a broker but a creator of culture, a great novel does not only present a culture but also makes culture; such a work does not only bring news of the world but also evokes the reader's empathy and reminds him of his own existential condition."

Read the rest of the review on the San Francisco Chronicle's companion website, SFGate.com.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller reviewed The Norman Maclean Reader last Saturday. Maclean published only one book, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, during his lifetime, but that one book—published when he was 74—assured his place in American literature.

Keller talks about why he didn't publish more:

Whether living in Illinois or Montana, though, Maclean wrote constantly; it was his perfectionism that kept him from publishing until he was in his seventh decade, his sense that a work could always be made better, the ideas sharper, the images more telling.

Because he cared so much about getting it just right, writing never came easy for him. In a 1986 interview reprinted in The Norman Maclean Reader, he said of literature, "It's a highly disciplined art. It's costly. You have to give up a lot of yourself to do it well. It's like anything you do that's rather beautiful."

We have a website for Norman Maclean.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday marked what would have been the 103rd birthday of the eldest daughter of novelist Thomas Mann. Erika Mann, born November 9, 1905, was a writer in her own right, though her father's fame overshadowed her own accomplishments in her lifetime. More recently, however, Andrea Weiss has restored Erika, and her brother Klaus, to their rightful places in the spotlight.

In the Shadow of Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story is an intimate portrait of Mann's two eldest children, who were unconventional, rebellious, and fiercely devoted to each other. Empowered by their close bond, they espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a Europe swept up in fascism and were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of secrecy and repression. They were serious authors, performance artists before the medium existed, and political visionaries whose searing essays and lectures are still relevant today. And, as Andrea Weiss reveals in this dual biography, their story offers a fascinating view of the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their times.

In the Shadow of Magic Mountain was the lead review in the November 6 London Review of Books and has been praised by the late John Leonard in Harper's and in the Times (UK): "A fascinating tale. Outside the pages of the Manns' own memoirs and essays, or of Klaus's deeply personal fiction, it's hard to imagine it more sympathetically told." To celebrate Erika's birthday, dress in your finest androgynous fashions and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian | Literature
Posted by SXH at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Phillip Adams, host of the Australian news radio show Late Night Live, recently conducted an interview with poet and novelist Ha Jin, a Chinese ex-pat who struggled through his country's Cultural Revolution as an uneducated soldier in the People's Liberation Army to eventually become one of the United States' most admired writers of world literature. Jin has authored numerous semi-fictional books about China and Chinese culture in the English language including his most famous Waiting and War Trash.

In the interview, he discusses his hard fought journey to literary stardom and the new place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—topics that also take center stage in his most recent book The Writer as Migrant, a book that places his own life as a literary exile alongside those of other migrant writers from Nabokov to Naipaul.

Listen to the archived audio of the interview on the Late Night Live website.

Or, find out more about The Writer as Migrant.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Life in Italy is seldom simple. One does not go there for simplicity but for interest: to make the adventure of existence more vivid, more poignant.” Such a life is what Shirley Hazzard found when she first landed on the shore of Naples as a young woman in the early 1950s: underneath the devastation caused by World War II, the city that had bewitched such literary visitors as Byron and Goethe remained intact, ready to charm the patient and attentive traveler.

That sojourn was the first step in a lifelong love affair with Naples. Along with her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, Hazzard made Naples a second home for decades, and The Ancient Shore collects the best of her writings on the city, its people, and its literary heritage. While acknowledging that Naples can be off-putting to the casual tourist, Hazzard takes readers behind the city’s rebarbative face, showing the underlying beauty and unrivaled hospitality that await those who take the time to truly understand its rhythms and its history. A much-loved New Yorker essay by Steegmuller telling the harrowing story of his mugging—and the attentive care he received in its aftermath—rounds out a collection that memorably limns the inherent contradictions of contemporary Naples: prickly but passionate, violent but giving, and always breathtakingly unforgettable. Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From a youth spent as a manual laborer in China’s Cultural Revolution to winning the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, Ha Jin has taken a remarkable journey across eras and continents, one that has left him one of the most admired figures in world literature. Now, in his first work of nonfiction, he reflects on the very circumstance of being a writer in a new land, a representative, willingly or not, of a place one has left—but can never truly leave behind.

In The Writer as Migrant, Ha Jin explores his own life and work alongside those of writers throughout literary history who have found themselves, exiles or immigrants, struggling to find their way in a new place and a new culture. Writing in a clear, almost conversational style, he considers the works of writers from Joseph Conrad to W.G. Sebald, Vladimir Nabokov to V. S. Naipaul, exploring questions of language, politics, duty, and the very concept of home. Some of those writers have served as models for Ha Jin, while others have remained enigmas—or even antagonists—but all have been crucial to his understanding of the complicated place of a migrant writer.

A slim but powerful reflection, The Writer as Migrant introduces us to a new facet of one of our most exciting writers, revealing him to be a thoughtful, penetrating, and generous reader of literature as well.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month marks four years since the death of a philospher who then-French president Jacques Chirac remembered as “one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time.” Jacques Derrida died in Paris on October 8, 2004, but his legacy lives on in many fields of the humanities, as well as many volumes of books published by the University of Chicago Press. The most recent is the newly-published Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida by Mustapha Chérif.

In the spring of 2003, Derrida sat down for a public debate in Paris with Algerian intellectual Chérif. The eminent philosopher arrived at the event directly from the hospital where he had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the illness that would take his life just over a year later. That he still participated in the exchange testifies to the magnitude of the subject at hand: the increasingly distressed relationship between Islam and the West, and the questions of freedom, justice, and democracy that surround it.

For more on Derrida, check out Chicago’s extensive list of his publications and our website memorial in honor of the great philosopher.

Archived in Literature | Philosophy
Posted by SXH at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Senator John Kerry is catching a lot of flak for the widely reported joke he told earlier this week at Senator John McCain's expense. Reportedly, though, the joke generated "lots of laughter" in Kerry's audience. Whether the crack makes you laugh or wince (or both), Ted Cohen's Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters can explain how this joke—-and others like it—work. For Cohen, jokes are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes. In other cases, the sting just becomes more potent. Indeed, the fuss over Kerry's joke is just the latest in a series of incidents that exemplify American humor's increasingly embattled nature.

Immersing us in the ranks of contemporary joke tellers—from Jon Stewart to Bill Clinton to Beavis and Butt-Head—who aim to do more than simply amuse, Paul Lewis's Cracking Up explains how American humor functions in these contentious times. Stephen Kercher's Revel with a Cause (excerpt), meanwhile, reminds us of the debt that comics like Stewart and Stephen Colbert owe to Mort Sahl, Stan Freberg, and Lenny Bruce—liberal satirists who, through their wry and scabrous comedic routines, waged war against the political ironies, contradictions, and hypocrisies of their times.

In short, today's political jokes have a long backstory. And how many places other than here can you read about the rich intellectual tradition of what, at first glance, might have seemed like throw-away laugh lines?

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adults looking for something to read during the American Library Association's Teen Read Week October 12 to 18 should look no further than Seth Lerer's Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Amid other revelations about teen staples from Judy Blume novels to the Harry Potter series, Lerer shows that the category of Young Adult literature was originally created to keep "offensive" materials off the children's shelves of libraries.

His breadth, ecompassing centuries of books for children of all ages, virtually guarantees that you'll discover something new in Children's Literature about a book you loved as a kid. Chicagoans can even make those discoveries in person, when Lerer presents his book tonight at the Newberry Library (which, on a related note, currently has a great exhibition featuring its collection of children's books--700 years worth of them). If you're not able to make it, you can at least console yourself with this excerpt.

Archived in Author Events | Literature
Posted by MM at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, before the Swedish Academy awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Academy secretary Horace Engdahl caused a bit of a kerfuffle by suggesting that "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

Notwithstanding GalleyCat's recent musing on how "Engdahl makes the leap from American publishers not cranking out more world literature in translation to American novelists not being as good as their European counterparts," it's true that books in translation make up only about three percent of U.S. publishers' output.

UCP, happily, has made a healthy contribution to the three percent. We are perhaps best known in this arena for making French philosophy available to American readers, but our long list of books in translation also includes works that range from Le Clézio's The Mexican Dream and the epic The Journey to the West to a wide selection of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's writings and Rumi's mystical poems. Providing an insider's view of this world of literature, Mary Ann Caws's Surprised in Translation celebrates the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from some of the most flavorful translations of well-known authors.

For more translations of well-known—and unknown—authors, explore Words Without Borders or Three Percent. And, of course, our international selections of fiction, poetry, and folklore.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
Posted by MM at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Swedish Academy announced today that French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Among the dozen works by Le Clézio translated into English, the University of Chicago Press published The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations. Unlike most of Le Clézio’s work, The Mexican Dream is nonfiction. “What motivated me,” Le Clézio said, “was a sort of dream about what has disappeared and what could have been.” Many dreams unfold in the book: the dream that was the religion of the Aztecs, the dream of the conquistadores, and a dream of the present—a meditation on the ways that Amerindian civilizations move the imaginations of Europeans.

The translator of The Mexican Dream is Teresa Lavender Fagan, who also works here at the Press. Teresa has this response to the news:

I am delighted—but not at all surprised!—that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When I read Le rêve mexicain—The Mexican Dream—for the first time, I was transported by Le Clézio’s language and message. The author imagined how the thought of early Indian civilizations might have evolved if not for the interruption of European conquest. And how our own civilization might have been different had we had the continued input of such advanced, now vanished, peoples. Those questions, and Le Clézio’s recounting of the Conquest in his beautiful, lyrical prose, truly transformed my view of Western civilization. It is an honor to have translated the book and to have worked with the author, a most deserving Nobel Prize winner.

An audio interview with Le Clézio is on the Nobel Prize website.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
Posted by DB at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As if we weren't already struggling to sort through all of this election season's political analogies, Stephen Greenblatt threw literature into the mix when he appeared last week on self-fashioned pundit Stephen Colbert's show to ponder which presidential candidates are like which Shakespearean characters.

Does Obama's story parallel Hamlet's? Was Macbeth the original "McMaverick"? In addition to answering such crucial questions, this Shakespearean smackdown lends literary heft to the staging of tonight's presidential debate at Nashville's Belmont University.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
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William Davies King, author of Collections of Nothing was interviewed yesterday by Deborah Harper for the Psychjourney website podcast. King's book is an illuminating mediation on the author's own habit of amassing the most unusual collections—everything from cereal boxes to nondescript loops of wire—things which many people might regard as junk, but which King finds that by collecting, he can imbue with meaning, even value.

In the podcast, Harper engages King in a discussion about his book, his collections, and his fascinating insights on the impulse to accumulate. Navigate to the Psychjourney website to listen.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
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The Popmatters website recently posted an interesting review of William Davies King's new book Collections of Nothing. In the review David Banash praises King for using an introspective meditation on his own habit of collecting to produce a revelatory look at the everyday objects that fill our lives. Banash writes:

In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction… [Walter] Benjamin suggests that the power of the camera to bring our world into focus dramatically alters our perception of it, most often by slowing things down or getting us much closer to them, and King's fascinating habit of collecting does, I think, something much the same.…

King is one of the few people who have taken the time to really look at our world of disposable objects. His practice of collecting has slowed him down and shifted him into a new mode of consciousness, and he thus allows us something like a close-up, slow-motion pan across all the objects that we so quickly turn away from that they never really register with us as the things that they are. King's altered consciousness is not a gateway into some other world, but a blinding illumination of our everyday unconscious.

Read the review on the Popmatters website.

Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Reviews
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Yesterday's Financial Times ran a positive review of Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips' psychoanalytic exploration of human intimacy in their new book, Intimacies. Summarizing the work the FT's Salley Vickers writes:

Taking the form of a conversation between this congenial but not necessarily like-minded pair, Intimacies explores the pitfalls and possibilities of human intimacy and the damage that a zeal to know ourselves and others can wreak. The exchange of views reflects the authors' philosophies: differences are the source, not the stumbling blocks, of intimacy; distance should enhance not diminish pleasure in others' company; and it is disastrous to take things personally.

Read the full review on the Financial Times website.

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eugene G. Schwartz offers an excellent review of Susan Bielstein's guide through the labyrinthine world of visual image copyright law, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, for his latest posting on ForeWord magazine's Publishing Matters blog:

Before the internet, and especially before desk top publishing, you pretty much had to work with physical copies of things.… This imposed a variety of practical barriers that kept the leakage of rights to a minimum and concentrated its more substantial flow in the hands of professional thieves.

All of that has changed—and with the low cost and ubiquity of scanners, [and] cell phone cameras… gate-keeping the rights of images is like keeping a safe deposit box in a room with an open window.

Nonetheless, the publishing industry still relies on copyright law as the foundation of its economic viability. As all who read ForeWord well know, publishers have struggled to cope with establishing rights in an electronic world, and authors and agents have been pushing back while warily going with the flow.

All of this leads to a book I'd like to recommend to any of you who are interested in the subject, and especially if you deal with pictures as well as intellectual property and copyright in general: Permissions, A Survival Guide. Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, by Susan M. Bielstein.

The author is the executive editor for art, architecture, classical studies and film at the University of Chicago Press.… The practical value of this work is that it draws on the author's experience and she takes you through the details of everything from choosing the size and format of digital files that you may be ordering to how to negotiate on price with museums. There is also a useful bibliography and a short list of image banks and artist's rights organizations.

The real meat on the bone of this work, however, is the author's blending of anecdotal experience, procedural advice and a critical effort to point the way out of the box that electronic reproduction and increasing layers of rights control are putting the users of creative assets—adding thickets of procedural obstacles and barriers of cost that lead either to shrinking use and availability or increasing use without permission.

Read the rest of the review on the Publishing Matters blog.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Law | Literature | Reference and Writing | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The arts and culture website Trickhouse.com is currently featuring an online exhibition of the collages of William Davies King, professor of theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of the recently released Collections of Nothing. King's book is a profound meditation on his habit of gathering miscellany—what many would consider junk. But through the careful organization and presentation of his collections, King demonstrates how even the most humble objects are able to accrue new, individualized value. And King's collages, accompanied by an insightful curatorial essay by David Banash, are a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. Navigate to www.trickhouse.org and click on door #3 to visit the online exhibition.

Also read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In remembrance of Nobel Prize winning novelist, dramatist, and historian Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn who passed away last Sunday, the Boston Globe blog Off the Shelf has posted a short piece excerpting from Ha Jin's forthcoming collection of essays about literary exiles, The Writer as Migrant. Solzhenitsyn lived much of his life in exile from his Russian homeland due to his sharp criticism of the government and the publication of his writings about the Soviet Gulag. In the opening essay of his book, Jin explores Solzhenitsyn's life in exile and the reception of his writings in his Russian homeland and in the Western world to which he was forced to flee.

Navigate to the Off the Shelf blog to read the excerpt.

Ha Jin's The Writer as Migrant is currently scheduled for publication in November of 2008.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 31 edition of the London Review of Books has published several interesting articles focusing on two recent books, both of which offer some intriguing insights into the West's engagement with Middle Eastern Muslim cultures in the twentieth century.

As the LRB's Roxanne Varzi notes, Gillian Whitlock's Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit is a fascinating exploration of modern Middle Eastern autobiography, that demonstrates how the genre has been used in Western society as a window into an often inaccessible culture, but perhaps more often is appropriated and commodified by Western culture to serve its own interests. In her article Varzi focuses on the latter phenomenon writing:

"You shouldn't overlook the what Gillian Whitlock in Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, calls the paratext: the liminal features that surround the text, not just the book's jacket and typeface but interviews with the author, reviews and commentaries. It is in transit, as commodities, that these narratives, which Whitlock calls 'veiled memoirs,' are shaped by and for the public. Whitlock reproduces an Audi ad that shows [Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran], outfitted in a cream suit, floating among shelves of books in a library (a library that contains no contemporary Iranian literature) above the words: 'Never let reality get in the way of imagination.' She is presented as the embodiment of imagination, and yet the 'reality' of contemporary Iran, which she claims to reveal to her audiences, is what provides her cultural capital.

Reading these memoirs, like watching bad reality television, gives the false sense that we are being told the 'truth' by the powerless at a time when those with the power to construct reality have limited our access to the facts.

The July 31LRB also contains an interesting piece by Megan Vaughn on Richard C. Keller's Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa—a book that explores the history of French psychology in North Africa and its complicated nature as both a progressive and innovative scientific endeavor, and as a means for furthering colonial goals.

Pick up a copy of this month's LRB to read the full reviews.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Alford reviewed William Davies King's book, Collections of Nothing, in Sunday's New York Times Book Review. King, writes Alford, inspires a certain wariness in the reader:

We're talking about a man who once collected worn strips of masking tape that he pulled off the floor of a gymnasium, a man who collects the business cards of business card printers, even though he himself carries no business card.…

Part memoir and part disquisition on the psychological impulses behind the urge to accumulate, Collections of Nothing is a wonderfully frank and engaging look at one man's detritus-fueled pathology. King's honesty and ambivalence about his pastime only increases his emotional connection to the reader. I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and strangle him.

King believes that the impulse to collect comes "partly from a wound we feel deep inside this richest, most materialistic of all societies." But he also considers other possibilities—"It finds order in things, virtue in preservation, knowledge in obscurity, and above all it discovers and even creates value." His own fondness is for "the mute, meager, practically valueless object. … What I like is the potency of the impotent thing, the renewed and adorable life I find in the dead and despised object." For him, there's "something in nothing." A lot of nothing

Read the rest of the review and read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biography | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

Read the press release. Also, read an excerpt and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Press Releases
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Colin Marshall of the Santa Barbara Independent talked to of William Davies King last week about his new book, Collections of Nothing. From broken folding chairs to soup labels, as Marshall writes, "King's are collections of nothing, that is, things of no outward value." Yet through the act of gathering, organizing, and displaying these objects, King finds them imbued with a deeply personal significance:

"It comes out of a 20th-century vocabulary of art, going back to Dadaism, which was an art that believed in nothing" King said. "My own education led me to the Dadaist artists and their strange, often outsider art that was alert to the idea that emptiness of meaning might be as expressive and 'true' as art that purports to be full of meaning. I searched for artwork that would express my own anxiety in the face of the modern world's questionable values. I think anxiety takes the form of nothingness: it's this strange void within you that never seems to get filled up."

Read the article on the Santa Barbara Independent website. We have an excerpt from the book and an essay by the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Few fictional works are as long, or as universally acclaimed, as Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Originally published in twelve volumes over a thirty-year period, we republished them in 1995 in a lovely package of four books. Powell's epic literary tale of twentieth-century London continues to enthrall readers. Cynthia Crossen has an appreciative review in today's Wall Street Journal. From the review:

I have just finished the first two books in the 12-volume cycle, and I'm definitely going to read the rest. I've thrown in my lot, at least for the next few weeks, with Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, and his well-born friends, lovers and enemies in England between 1914 and 1971.

Novels of manners are often dismissed as soap operas, aimed at women who cut their literary teeth on Jane Austen. Men don't live in the parlor; they go to war, or at least to work. But Mr. Powell, from his own experience, knew that men indeed live in the parlor, like it or not, and spend agonizing amounts of time trying to make sense out of other people's domestic behavior. Mr. Powell, wrote the English critic V. S. Pritchett, "revived the masculine traditions of English social comedy."

What elevates soap opera to the level of literature are the intelligence, sensitivity and comic eye of the author, especially how deeply he or she penetrates human character. Appearances are important, too, and Mr Powell is a puckish observer of the human form. "His hands were small and gnarled, with nails worn short and cracked, as if he spent his spare time digging with them down in the soil. Stringham had said that the nails of the saint who had hollowed out his own grave without tools might fairly have competed against Widmerpool's in a manicure contest."

Click on the first search result on Google News to read the full review, or find out more about the books on our website:

A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement

A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 4 Times Literary Supplement ran an excellent review Evelyn Bloch-Dano's Madame Proust: A Biography—an engaging account of the life of Jeanne Wiel, mother to Marcel Proust, and as Bloch-Dano demonstrates, a decisive influence on the great writer's career. Touching on a myriad of ways in which Proust's mother helped to mold her son into one of the nineteenth-century's most famous novelists the review pays special attention to Proust's mother as a German Jew living in France just before the Dreyfus affair, which revealed the strong undercurrents of antisemitism and injustice that permeated French culture and greatly affected the role Jeanne took in protecting her son from the social pressures and prejudices of the day. Ingrid Wassenar writes for the TLS:

For Bloch-Dano the key to Jeanne is her status as an assimilated Jew. She is represented as a Third Republic Esther: "To save her people, Esther must hide her true origins without ever denying them." In the Old Testament, Esther treads a fine line between obeying the Persian King Ahasuerus and placating her Israelite uncle, Mordecai. In similar ways Jeanne Weil did not truly belong to herself.…

Madame Proust raises fascinating questions about the nature of maternal love and the degree to which motherhood necessitates self-effacement. As the author insists: "We have to admit that this supremely intelligent woman had no other ambition than the happiness of her loved ones. She wouldn't have conceived of her role as sacrificial, but let's hope there were some secondary benefits.…"

Read an excerpt from the book on our website.

In the same issue Paul Reitter continues on the theme of Judaism in Western culture with a review of Michael P. Steinberg's Judaism Musical and Unmusical. Steinberg's book argues that modernity gave rise to a Jewish consciousness that has increasingly distanced itself from the sacred in favor of worldliness and secularity—a trend contributed to by a who's who of Jewish composers and intellectuals including such figures as Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon, Arnaldo Momigliano, Leonard Bernstein, and Daniel Libeskind. From Reitter's review:

In 1934, Sigmund Freud, old, ailing, and painfully aware of the precariousness of the political situation in Austria, decided to write a book about Moses.… Completed in exile in Britain, Moses and Monotheism argues —doggedly and not very convincingly—that Moses was an Egyptian. Thus, at a time of unprecedented Jewish dispossession, we find Freud struggling mightily to take away Moses, too.… [But in] Steinberg's reading, Freud, by denying "his people" Moses, does nothing other than make his greatest gift to "the Jews."

The idea on which this interpretation rests is an organizing principle in Steinberg's book. What he admires and wants to track are certain modern Jewish "subjectivities," ones that for him emerged vividly in Central Europe and … involved "resisting" the ideology of origins, "loving history," and cultivating a reflective cosmopolitan "secularity.…"

Steinberg's "constellating of Jewishness…could well have a substantial impact on discussions of Central European Jewish culture, where, as he emphasizes, there is a pressing need for new conceptual life.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Music | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Set in the fictitious town of Manawaka, Manitoba, Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel offers a moving portrait of its protagonist, nonagenarian Hagar Shiply, as she struggles to come to terms with the troubles of her past in a dramatic story of a life drawing to a close. Alongside the other novels in her "Manawaka series"—A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House: Stories, and The Diviners—Laurence's The Stone Angel has been lauded as one of her most poignant narratives and the most famous work by one of Canada's most prominent feminist writers.

The book was also recently made into a feature film by Canadian filmmaker Kari Skogland with its world premiere showing at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. This Friday, July 11 the film will also see its U.S. debut in select theaters, including NYC's Landmark Century theaters, and hopefully will see a wider distribution (to Chicago maybe) in the following weeks. Check out a trailer for the film on the official The Stone Angel movie website, or find out more about the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | Fiction | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Seth Lerer was featured on the Wednesday July 2 edition of WBUR's On Point with guest host Jane Clayson to discuss his new book Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. More than just a historical account of the iconic works of children's literature, as Clayson notes, Lerer's book can be read as a history of childhood itself as children are indelibly molded by the tales they hear and read—stories they will one day share with their own sons and daughters.

Listen to the podcast of their fascinating discussion about children's literature and what it tells us about growing up on the WBUR website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 7 edition of The New Yorker briefly but approvingly notes William Davies King's memoir of his lifelong obsession with ephemera, Collections of Nothing. The New Yorker praises the book for "the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one" and continues:

"I lost and found myself in remote topical aisles of scholarship-wreck," [King] says of his hours in Yale's library, reading the most obscure books he could find. His hard-won self-awareness gives his disclosures an intensity that will likely resonate with all readers, even those whose collections of nothing contain nothing at all.

Read the rest at The New Yorker website. Also read an excerpt from the book and an essay by King, “Nothing to Speak About.”

Collections of Nothing was also an object of much affection on Omnivoracious and the cover is “Most Coveted Cover #181” over at Readerville.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today about the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria discussing, among other topics, a fascinating talk given by Professor Alan Liu—one of the leading theorists focusing on the intersection between digital technology and the humanities, and the author of several books on the subject including, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information and the forthcoming Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Writing for the Chronicle William Pannapacker takes note of Liu's talk for its examination of the increasing use of digital information resources like Wikipedia by students, and the problem of its limitations in terms of scholarly authority. Pannapacker writes:

Since it's clear enough that Wikipedia—and other sites based on reader-generated content—are too large and accessible to police themselves effectively, Liu argues that the responsibility for that policing should be adopted by the already existing structures of authority, including academe in particular.

I have to agree: We can't get our students into the libraries; we hardly go there ourselves anymore, as much as we might love them. The time has just about arrived when information that is not online does not exist for most people.…

Of course, Liu's presentation raises more questions than it answers: There are, after all, so many complications about the means by which credibility can be rated. We all know the peer-review system is not perfect.

But Liu's vision of a more public, collaborative, and service-oriented role for professors has considerable appeal to me, and it charts some of the steps that must now be taken into this new world of online knowledge production.

Read the full article online at the Chronicle website, then navigate to the website for the University of Victoria's Digital Humanities Institute to view the archived podcast of Liu's talk.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week in the June 16 New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein had an interesting commentary on the New York Botanical Garden drawing on Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, to help him place the concept of the garden in the wider context of western history and demonstrate its enduring cultural and historical importance. Rothstein writes:

From medieval cloisters, botanical gardens made their way into universities, beginning with the University of Pisa in 1544. Later the garden's terrain expanded with botanical expeditions, oceanic trade and imperial adventures. Victorian botanical gardens could be encyclopedic in scope, arranging their displays according to Latin classifications of species by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.

Now, in our humid, dry, cooled or heated greenhouses, we shun such systematic display. Instead we replicate ecological niches, miniature worlds that supposedly show nature at work: the desert, the rainforest, the tropical pool. But peel back the environmental stagecraft, and the scientific cultivation continues with even greater passion…

There is something moving about the entire enterprise. In a remarkable new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison (who wrote similar meditations on cemeteries and on forests) elicits some of the meanings that have accumulated around the idea of a garden, from myths, in which the chosen few "can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body's passions," to places like Versailles, which reflect "an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission." In those royal gardens Mr. Harrison also finds the urge to encompass and incorporate and comprehend: "the militant humanism of the age."

Our age's humanism is much more modest. We are self-effacing to a fault. We don't seem to be taming nature, but to be permitting its full range of expression. We allow it to express multiple perspectives. We don't permit any habitat to dominate, and we defer to the demands of each. We seem to submit to nature. Of course we are creating images of ourselves.

Read the rest of the article online at the NYT website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Classics | History | Literature | Philosophy | Religion
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the second half of the program Irene Virag, garden columnist at Newsday and a writer for several gardening magazines, joined the discussion.

You may also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature | Philosophy
Posted by DB at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of African American author Richard Wright, whose famous novels Black Boy and Native Son redefined race relations in the 20th century. Appropriate to the occasion, the press released a new paperback edition of the authoritative biographical account of Wright's tumultuous life and literary career, Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley. An illuminating article in the June 11 edition of the Times Literary Supplement references Rowley's book as it delivers a short biography of Wright, describing his rise and fall as one of the "stars" in the early twentieth century's "literary firmament," his complicated relationship to the civil rights movement, and the "hazards of his expatriation to France in the late 1940's." You can read the full article by James Campbell at the TLS Online. And then navigate here to find out more about Rowley's biography.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In today's edition of the New York Sun Eric Ormsby reviews two new histories of children's literature including Seth Lerer's new book, Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. In the review Ormsby praises Lerer for his ability to capture the special role the iconic books of childhood play in the lives of young readers. Ormsby writes:

In Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter Seth Lerer notes that the history of children's books is a study "of books as valued things, crafted and held, lived with and loved." This fundamental insight gives a human touch to what might otherwise have been a dusty foray into long forgotten hornbooks and primers. But Mr. Lerer, a philologist by training — and professor of English at Stanford — loves words, as well as the books made from them, and he is an impassioned reader. Whether he's discussing the grim New England Primer of 1727 or the decisive impact of Darwinism on late-19th-century children's fiction, he has a keen sense of what he nicely calls "the pocket-worlds of childhood.…" As Mr. Lerer says, "the adventures of the child go on in secret spaces: in the purses, pockets, tills, and palms of life." The most successful children's books are those which capture something of that childhood sense of secrecy.

Read the rest of the review online at the New York Sun website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In last Saturday's edition of the Daily Telegraph Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviewed The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. In his review Douglas-Fairhurst gives a short overview of the social and historical significance of the "flash" papers—the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York City's extensive sexual underworld—touching on their appeal to readers in the UK and taking an amusing jab at one of the Telegraph's competitors:

"Flash" newspapers offered a titillating guide to the pleasures of urban life that had hitherto been spoken of only in hushed whispers: brothels, pornography, dog fights, playhouses, bare-knuckle boxing and more.

Crammed into a handful of closely printed pages was up-to-date gossip, sexual scandal, handy tips on how to avoid picking up a prostitute with a glass eye (the key, it seemed, was to avoid women wearing veils), and blustering attacks on anyone, such as immigrants or "sodomites", who might have threatened the developing group identity of these cocky young men about town.

By 1842, four rival publications in New York "squawked in competition" for their custom. Adventurous readers could use the Flash, the Whip, the Rake or the Libertine as a map to the seamy corners of a city that was often described, with pride and alarm, as "a modern Sodom.…"

The engagingly written introduction to this anthology argues plausibly that the flash press was the last occasion on which mainstream American journalism tried to titillate as well as entertain its readers.

For a British reader, the spectacle of writing that smacks its lips over the vices it claims to be disgusted by will seem far more familiar. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to discover that many of the most salacious stories printed in the flash press were taken from newspapers originally published in London.

Still, it is a nice historical coincidence that two of the New York papers from which the flash press evolved were called the Star and the Sun, just as it is fun to learn that one of the editors also started up a "frothy weekly with literary pretensions called the Sunday Times."

Read the full review on the Telegraph website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
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Jonathan Rosen, editorial director of Nextbook, wrote an appreciative review of Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition for the June 7 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Titled "Paradox Among the Petals," the review begins:

The rabbis of the Talmud counseled that if you are planting a tree and someone tells you that the Messiah has come, you should finish planting your tree and then go out to investigate. Robert Pogue Harrison implies something similar in his rich and beguiling Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Gardens, though they offer peace and repose, are islands of care, he writes, not a refuge from it. That is why they are important, since care is what makes us human.

This is the third book by Harrison that we have published and each has been a meditation on humanity and the natural world. As a professor of Italian literature, Harrison's work is steeped in classical and modern literature, but as the quote above suggests, he also draws deeply from the religious and philosophical traditions. His previous books include The Dominion of the Dead and Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.

Update June 11: Gardens was also reviewed in today's New York Sun by Eric Ormsby.

You may read an excerpt from Gardens.

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
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San Francisco Chronicle reporter Susan Fornoff recently talked with Stanford University professor Robert Pogue Harrison about his new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Harrison uses gardens both literally and figuratively for a philosophical exploration from antiquity to the present, showing the connections between horticultural cultivation and the cultivation of the human mind. Fornoff's engaging article appeared today in the Chronicle and discusses gardening, the culture of consumption, and human happiness:

Harrison's … excursion through literature and history revealed a gardening ethic of care that the garden he tends at Stanford University—that of young minds, not plant seedlings—leads him to believe is in some jeopardy.

"This gardening ethic is very much in danger these days, where the emphasis on cultivation has given way to an emphasis on consumption," says Harrison, asserting that a Stanford student would be more inclined to inspect another's backyard on HGTV than to investigate one of the many campus gardens.

"We live in a kind of frenzy of consumerism which forgets that the true source of human happiness is not in the consuming but in the cultivation, in seeing something grow, or caring for something that is not yourself. And I don't know how much we teach the young this ethic of caring for something that is not yourself. Or even caring for things such as an object or a plant. Consumption and cultivation are at war with each other.

If I have any modest expectation for the book, it's just to try to help add to the awareness that consumerism is not a very promising formula for happiness."

The Chronicle article is illustrated with some photos of Kingscote Garden on the grounds of Stanford University, a secret treasure of a garden which Harrison imagines as "the quietly palpitating heart of the university."

Closer to home, Chicago Tribune critic Julia Keller describes herself as "completely besotted" by "this extraordinary, luminous book." Says Keller:

The author has a knack for elucidating complex thoughts with supple skill, so that you never feel lectured to or belittled. His book is sprinkled with references to classic literature, from the Bible to Homer's Odyssey to John Milton's Paradise Lost to Dante's Divine Comedy, but Harrison is such a wonderful teacher that even works you might not know so well go down easy, like the first swallow of chilled lemonade after a hot afternoon spent yanking weeds.

We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing banishes winter's lethargy more quickly than that first sight of the green of spring, as trees bud and our gardens, once again, burst into glorious bloom. For Robert Pogue Harrison, it's not just the depths of winter that gardens help us escape: throughout human history, gardens—both real and imagined—have been essential places of refuge and comfort in the face of a harsh, often violent world.

Employing the richly learned and allusive approach that he brought to his classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Harrison explores here the central importance of the human urge to nurture and cultivate gardens. Beginning with ancient conceptions of the garden as a place for the quiet work of self-improvement that is crucial to serenity and enlightenment, Harrison then travels widely through the history of Western culture. Enlisting such varied thinkers and writers as Voltaire and Calvino, Boccaccio and Arendt, Harrison profoundly demonstrates the role the garden has long played as a necessary, humanizing check against the degradation and losses of history.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Classics | History | Literature | Philosophy | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday the New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an excellent piece on Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York—a fascinating exhumation and examination of the weekly periodicals that covered and publicized nineteenth-century New York City's extensive sexual underworld. Novelist Nicholson Baker writes for NYTBR:

Cohen, Gilfoyle and a third writer, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz have together produced The Flash Press, the first book-length survey of this strange rock-pool of 1840s profligacy. Readers of Kurt Andersen's recent historical novel Heyday—and indeed everyone interested in knowing what New York City was like before the Civil War—will want to have a peek. The authors have managed to unearth and collate a remarkable amount of enriching detail about a curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing.

Nicholson concludes his review:

Thanks to… the meticulous research of these three scholars, we once again have a way of looking through a tiny, smudged window into New York's long-past illicit life. Oh, and the drawing of the chambermaid and her warming pan is on Page 101.

Read the full review. NYT writer Jennifer Schuessler has a posting on the Paper Cuts blog about the book. We have three excerpts from the flash press on our website.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
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In Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, Seth Lerer tells us the bedtime story of Western culture's obsession with books for the young. He traces the transformative power of literature across centuries, from the moralizing allegories of antiquity to the swashbuckling epics of the nineteenth century and the acerbic self-awareness of Judy Blume and Weetzie Bat.

Written with the panoramic scope of a distinguished scholar and the affection of a parent and avid reader, Children's Literature reminds us of the sublime power of books in an era when videogames, MySpace, and text messaging compete for the free time of our youth.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Press Releases | Reference and Writing
Posted by TXM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The May 8 edition of the Times Higher Education ran several noteworthy reviews of Chicago books including Scott Herring's Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg's The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920.

Both books focus on the subject of social identification in the early twentieth century, the former delivering an insightful critique of American "slumming literature" and the gender stereotypes that the author claims the genre simultaneously acknowledged, yet undermined, while the latter gives an equally penetrating analysis of the re-making of Italian cultural identity in the wake of WWI.

Read Denis Flanery's review of Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History.

You can find Steven Gundle's review of The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920 in the same issue.

A book published by Liverpool University Press, one of our distributed clients, was also reviewed in the May 8 THE. Read Martin Conreen's review of SK-INTERFACES: Exploding Borders in Art, Science and Technology.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
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Writing for last Tuesday's Village Voice, none other than Tom Robbins has given Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's new book, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York an approving thumbs-up for its revealing look at New York City's "flash papers"—the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York's extensive sexual underworld. All but forgotten after the era's burgeoning censorship and obscenity laws shut them down, as Robbins notes, the author's recent discovery of a cache of these papers held by the American Antiquarian Society sheds new light on the magazines' lurid tales of libidinous lechery. Robbins writes:

Sex has always sold well. Most of us just assumed it took the likes of Larry Flynt, Al Goldstein, and the rest of that merry band of porn purveyors to finally get it openly on the newsstands. But now comes news that more than a century before them, an earlier breed of devilish publishers delighted readers with similar publications right here in New York.

That discovery was no small thrill for historians of American smut when they unearthed copies of long-forgotten sex rags that flared briefly in the early 1840s. These Dead Sea Scrolls of sleaze were discovered when Patricia Cline Cohen, one of a trio of authors of The Flash Press, was visiting the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1987: "On one memorable day, Dennis R. Laurie, reference specialist of newspapers and periodicals, asked her if she might like to see some uncataloged New York titles of a somewhat disreputable character."

Cohen tipped co-author Timothy J. Gilfoyle to her discovery for his own book on the history of prostitution in New York (City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialism of Sex, 1790-1920); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz joined the team when another researcher whispered to her about some "racy primary sources."

Like Goldstein's Screw, the publishers chose titles that got right to the point: The Whip, The Rake, The Libertine, The Flash, and others with even shorter publishing lives. One of these, The New York Sporting Whip, offered a kind of mission statement: "Man is endowed by nature with passions that must be gratified," the newspaper asserted, "and no blame can be attached to him, who for that purpose occasionally seeks the woman of pleasure."

Read the rest of the review on the Village Voice website.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
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Writing in the May edition of The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens delivers a knowing synopsis of Cyril Connolly's classic memoir Enemies of Promise, the new release of which is scheduled to hit bookstores later this month:

Like a centaur, or perhaps a bit more like a pantomime horse, Enemies of Promise divides into two halves: the critical and the autobiographical. In the first half, Connolly surveys the literary scenery of his day and employs as his scaffolding and Waste Land surrogate George Crabbe's bleak and sarcastic poem The Village. This, with its vividly negative bucolic imagery of "the blighted rye," "the blue Bugloss," "the slimy Mallow," and "the Charlock's shade," allows him a special taxonomy of weeds and thistles as well as of growth without roots.

In the second half, titled "A Georgian Boyhood," he gives a lavishly detailed account of his education between the ages of 8 and 18, and shows an extraordinary confidence in the likeli­hood that this narrative will not prove ephemeral. The best-known phrase from this section is his "theory of permanent adolescence" as a description of the marination process of the English upper class.…

"It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual. Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over."

In the blistering prose that became Connolly's trademark, Enemies of Promise is a fascinating examination of high literature and high society from one the twentieth century's most influential and insightful critics.

Read the rest of the article on The Atlantic website.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Reviews
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William Davies King makes no bones about it: he's odd. And his collections are odder: loops of wire, skeleton keys, seafood tins, water bottle labels, envelope liners, strips of masking tape, canceled credit cards, boulders—and that's just for starters. You might call it junk, but to King, it's a very special sort of nothing. Suffice it to say, no one on earth has a garage quite like his.

King's unusual collections reflect his belief in the intrinsic value of the discarded, unwanted, and ephemeral—but as he makes clear in Collections of Nothing, the urge that drives his hoarding is not all that different from that which leads a more typical person to prize uncanceled stamps or pristine sets of baseball cards. Both an affecting memoir and an idiosyncratic examination of the desire to accumulate, Collections of Nothing takes us deep inside the soul of the solitary collector. King's life story is deftly interleaved with his insightful meditations on the nature of the acquisitive mind; the result is a book that defies categorization, a unique hybrid that will speak to anyone who has ever found himself bitten by the collecting bug.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Literature | Press Releases
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Published last week, Lee Siegel's newest book, Love and the Incredibly Old Man: A Novel scores a long and appreciative review in the April 18th edition of the Times Literary Supplement. Remarking on the unique autobiographical element of Siegel's fiction Stephen Burn's article begins:

Students of American writing have to distinguish between two Lee Siegels. Perhaps the more famous of the two is the New York critic Siegel, who was suspended from the New Republic in 2006 when it was discovered that he had been posting comments on the internet proclaiming his own brilliance. Oddly enough, the other, currently less famous Siegel—who is a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii—has also spent the last ten years writing about himself. His four inventive and amusing novels feature a character, Lee Siegel, who, the author complains, "has consistently tried to pass himself off as me."…

His new novel, Love and the Incredibly Old Man, belongs somewhere in the middle of a continuum running from the experiments of his first two novels to the more transparent style of Who Wrote the Book of Love?, but like all the earlier works it involves a story received from an old man. In this instance the elderly gentleman is extremely elderly: he claims to be Ponce de Léon who, having lived on the waters of the Fountain of Youth for nearly 500 years, now seeks a ghostwriter to record his story before he dies. Having been impressed by references to Ponce in Siegel's fiction, the conquistador hires the novelist to write his life.…

Siegel's achievement is to persuade the reader to care about such a self-involved, and possibly delusional character while staging jokes at his expense and displaying his own verbal dexterity. A creative attitude to the novel is in abundant evidence across all Siegel's fiction; and this new novel is a worthy addition to a body of work which deserves a wider audience.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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What Herman Melville did for the whale, Lee Siegel did for the Kama Sutra with his first critically acclaimed and enormously successful novel, Love in a Dead Language. Here Lee Siegel—no not THAT Lee Siegel, this is the other Lee Seigel, the nice Lee Siegel, the novelist, magician, and sex obsessed Lee Siegel—does the same for eternal love. The premise of this gem of a book is this: down on his luck in both letters and love, a reluctant Lee Siegel is summoned to a remote south Florida town by the conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon, who contrary to both history and legend not only discovered the Fountain of Youth, but has savored its waters for the past 540 years. But Ponce de Leon’s time is short—and it’s his dying wish that Lee Siegel ghostwrite his autobiography, chronicling his numerous romantic conquests, exploits, and misadventures. The result is everything readers have come to expect from this Lee Siegel: a tender, witty, and salacious picaresque of sorts that falls somewhere between Don Quixote, Don Juan, and in a perverse sort of way, Don DeLillo in its evocation of empire’s twilight, the lure of the libertine, and one hopeless romantic’s eternal quest for the ideal. Comic, lusty, and fully engaged with the act of invention, whether in love or on the page, Love and the Incredibly Old Man continues this Lee Siegel’s exuberant exploration of that sentiment which Ponce de Leon confesses has “transported me to the most joyous heights, plunged me to the most dismal depths, and dropped me willy-nilly and dumbfounded at all places in between.”

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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Germany’s leading literary family during the 20th century was headed by Thomas Mann and composed of six talented children, the most accomplished of which were Erika and Klaus. Long obscured by the fame of their domineering father, Erika and Klaus were prominent writers and artists in their own right who led fascinating, unconventional lives that mirrored the tumult and chaos of their times. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is their story. Andrea Weiss’s remarkable biography chronicles Erika and Klaus’s equally remarkable lives. Openly gay during an era of secrecy and repression; defiantly anti-fascist during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; intimate friends with such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau; performance artists before the phrase had even been coined, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is rich in anecdote and eye-opening details, sending the reader spinning and tumbling into the minds of these two extraordinary but neglected literary figures.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Press Releases
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Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences is a fascinating study of the work of some of the most influential expositors of scientific doctrine during the 19th century—though they are rarely credited as such. The names of the popular science writers of the Victorian era are often overshadowed by those of the scientists they wrote about, but as Jon Turney notes in a recent review for the Times Higher Education, in his new book Lightman skillfully illuminates their cultural and historical importance. Turney writes:

The Victorian explosion of print embraced a diversity of treatments of science and its significance that exhibits many of the tensions that still mark science in public. Who has the right to speak for science, to interpret nature or to have the final word on humans' place in a universe in which God's hand in creation is in question?

As he catalogues the many contributors to the new popular scientific literature, and their works, Lightman illuminates how the different answers to these questions played their part in battles over science's authority and cultural prestige.…

Throughout, Lightman pays detailed attention to publishers and print runs, as well as to the authors' lives and works. The book is a substantial work of scholarship rather than a casual read, and it offers much for historians of science as well as students of popular writing.

Read the rest of the review on the THE website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Literature | Reviews
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German intellectual Thomas Mann left behind not only the legacy of his extraordinary literary career, but six children who—though often overshadowed by their father's fame—became literary and artistic figures in their own right. In her new book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story Andrea Weiss delivers a dual biography of Mann's two eldest, Erika and Clause, whose literary, political, and artistic exploits she recounts in vivid detail. In a review running in the April edition of Harper's, John Leonard notes that in delivering its candid portrait of the Mann children's dramatic lives, the book also provides a revealing look inside the elite literary and artistic circles which the Mann children traversed. Leonard writes:

The years of exile, war, and America are an extravagance of highbrow gossip, with such raisins in the cake as André Gide, Bertolt Brecht, Sybille Bedford, Jean Cocteau, Stefan Zweig, Muriel Rukeyser, Christopher Isherwood, Janet Flanner, James Baldwin, and Carson McCullers. Erika wrote magazine articles and children's books; Klaus wrote novels, plays, and film scripts; and the two of them collaborated on travel books, all while the FBI and the INS were hot on their trail for "premature anti-Fascism."

Pick up the current issue of Harper's to find out more, or read an excerpt.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
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In a short review running in the April edition of the Atlantic Monthly reviewer Peter Hoey praises Richard B. Sher's The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America for its revealing account of the essential role publishers played in fostering the explosion of intellectual activity in Enlightenment Europe:

The marriage of commerce and culture is always fraught with difficulties, but when it works, its issue can indeed be remarkable. Nowhere was this truer than in Scotland during the late 18th century, when such writers as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns worked in creative cooperation with their equally enlightened publishers, disseminating their revolutionary works throughout Britain, Europe and most tellingly, the Americas. Discerningly illustrated, at once scholarly and accessible, this is an essential addition not only to 18th-century studies but also to the history of the book—a poignant subject in our post-book age.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Reviews
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Consistently an outsider—a child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual, a black man married to a white woman—Richard Wright nonetheless became the unparalleled voice of his time. The first full-scale biography of the author best known for his searing novels Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright: The Life and Times brings the man and his work—in all their complexity and distinction—to vibrant life. Acclaimed biographer Hazel Rowley chronicles Wright's unprecedented journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to Chicago's South Side to international renown as a writer and outspoken critic of racism.

Drawing on journals, letters, and eyewitness accounts, Richard Wright probes the author's relationships with Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, his attraction to Communism, and his so-called exile in France. Skillfully interweaving quotes from Wright's own writings, Rowley deftly portrays a passionate, courageous, and flawed man who would become one of our most enduring literary figures.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Black Studies | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another review from the Times Literary Supplement: in the January 4 edition Peter Hainsworth takes on two recent translations of twentieth century Italian poetry, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto and The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni—both are the first substantial translations of these masters of Italian poetry for English speaking audiences.

In the review Hainsworth delivers an enthusiastic appraisal of the two works:

Sereni and Zanzotto … embraced negatives and contradictions more wholeheartedly and more energetically than … the poets of the previous generation.… The result in both cases is a particularly adventurous and exciting body of work, constantly in evolution, sometimes (especially in the case of Zanzotto) on the edge of flamboyant avant-gardism, but somehow generally able to keep its poetic balance. What also gives both poets and others of their generation substance is the fact that they have something to say. Sereni's mature poetry is constantly probing issues of commitment, choice and understanding, often through a multiplicity of voices, criss-crossing and overlaying each other, with back references to his favorite poets or his own previous work.… They represent and enact the often dramatic confrontation of differing, often irreconcilable viewpoints and constantly changing perspectives.

Zanzotto's dizzying changes of tack and tone between nonsense, parody, and high literariness are similarly rooted in the sense of things being impossible to pin down in words, but take on concrete urgency through being clustered around a host of contemporary issues (ranging from war and environmental degradation to school teaching and lunar exploration).

Find out more about the work of these two remarkable poets on the UCP website:

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni: A Bilingual Edition

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
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In a book we published a few years back, British classicist Simon Goldhill explained the Greek and Roman roots of everything in contemporary Western culture, from our political systems to the quest for the perfect body. Still, we have traveled some ways from those classic roots, which perhaps accounts for why the works of Greek dramatists can seem so ancient and foreign when performed on a modern stage. Most of the action takes place offstage, the characters do more speechifying than dialogue, and a chorus shuffles on and off.

Goldhill's latest book, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, tackles this problem. Writing in a Commentary magazine blog, the Horizon, drama critic Terry Teachout discussed the book last week. Teachout noted that "most contemporary productions of Greek tragedy are exercises in theatrical futility" and summed up Goldhill's contribution:

His approach is at once deeply informed by the best academic scholarship and no less deeply rooted in a commonsense understanding of what works on stage. The result is one of the most instructive and lucidly written books about theater to have been published in recent years. No one whose interest in drama is more than merely casual should pass it by.

Archived in Classics | Literature | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Francis Ford Coppola's newest film, Youth Without Youth, opened on both coasts last Friday. The film is based on the book of the same name written by Mircea Eliade, who was a professor in the history of religions at the University of Chicago. The first paperback edition of Youth Without Youth features a new foreword by Coppola.

Bookforum has an interview with the director that makes some interesting comparisons between the film and the book. Coppola discusses his decision to adapt the book for the big screen:

Originally, for another project, I had been thinking about the twin challenge of cinematic language, which is the expression and manipulation of time while finding ways to try and tap into our unique human consciousness. It's hard to explain it, but we all kind of know what it is: that little thing in your head that seems to be you, through which you see all your experience and feel your emotion. A lot of filmmakers in the past, even the great Sergei Eisenstein, had thought about the representation of human consciousness. He wrote about it in the second of his books [Film Form (1949)], I think. A friend of mine who was an Orientalist and a scholar pointed me to some quotes from Mircea Eliade, whom I didn't know much about. I read some of these references, which ultimately led me to this novella. And it was a hell of a thing. It surprised me at every turn: Just when I'd think I got the story, it would turn a new page. It starts off with this lightning strike. And then he's rejuvenated. And suddenly he's talking to his double. And then the Nazis are after him. And he meets this woman who seems to be the reincarnated figure of an ancient Indian nun. I kept thinking, "What next?" I felt it could be made into a film that could be enjoyed on first viewing as a surprising story, but then you could see it again and find things to ruminate on more, about our perception of reality. Given my age and where I was at the time, I found myself with the opportunity to just go off and make it and not even tell anyone that I was making it.

Manohla Dargis reviewed the film last Friday in the New York Times. You can read the review and view a slideshow and the trailer for the film on their website. But take heed of the note about the film's rating at the end of the review:

"Youth Without Youth is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, sexual congress, female nudity, metaphysics."

Ah, metaphysics. We have the opening pages of the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
Posted by TXM at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Frances Ford Coppola was first introduced to Youth Without Youth by his former high school classmate and University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger, he was inspired to make his first film in ten years. Mircea Eliade's novella, now a major motion picture from Sony Pictures Classics, lies at the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science. The psychological thriller features an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic transformation that endows him with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension. Sought by the Nazis for medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei flees through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India in a surreal fantasy that tests the boundaries of genre and imagination.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Literary Review is currently running a piece on Simon Goldhill's new book, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today. As the Review's Fiona Macintosh notes, with new productions of Greek drama flooding the world of theater, Goldhill's book makes a timely effort to address the challenges involved in updating these ancient masterpieces for the modern stage. Macintosh writes:

Since the 1960s there has been an explosion in the number of performances of ancient plays not just in Europe, but increasingly across the globe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In many ways, Goldhill's new book is a response to this phenomenon. As he explains, directors or actors who are about to work with a Greek play regularly turn to scholars of ancient tragedy for assistance; and one frequent question concerns what they should read. Goldhill says his book grew out of one such query from Vanessa Redgrave, when she was having a difficult time in West End as the eponymous heroine of Euripides' Hecuba, with a director she couldn't abide and in a part which had just been played superlatively by Claire Higgins at the Donmar Warehouse…

The review continues:

As one would expect from Goldhill, author of a number of respected discussions of Greek tragedy, the sections on the individual plays are lucid and highly informative. There are also particularly important caveats for the theater practitioner.… However, it is not just the would-be practitioner who could benefit from reading this book: there are equally good nuggets for the seasoned scholar of Greek tragedy. None better, perhaps, than this one concerning the theatrical genre that has drained more ink down the centuries than any other: 'Tragedy is a genre of conflict, not only between people or between ideas, but also conflict about what words mean.' With a definition of tragedy as succinct and incisive as this one, some might even be tempted to adopt this definition and cast the notoriously open-ended Aristotelian one to the wind.

Archived in Classics | History | Literature | Reviews
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The Sacramento Theatre Company reimagines Euripides' Electra as Electricidad, while off-Broadway's Signature Theatre puts on Iphigenia 2.0 and an Indian director stages Raja Oedipus, an adaptation of the famous Sophocles play featuring Karbi gods and goddesses in place of the original Greek deities: if you've seen any of these recent performances—or one of their countless counterparts on stages across the globe—you've experienced the timelessness, renewed popularity, and ever-broadening reach of Greek tragedy. But how are today's productions different from their ancient peers? What are the best strategies for interpreting these dramas on contemporary stages? In this follow-up to his acclaimed Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds to these questions (and many others) with his long-awaited guide How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | Education | History | Literature | Press Releases
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It's the late 1960s. You're nine years old, living in Bombay, and your family is a bit … complicated. Your mother was born in America, but she has fully adopted Indian dress, customs, and attitudes. Your Indian father, meanwhile, is cynical, worldly, and deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of mysticism or religion—which includes much of Indian culture. Then, out of the blue, your sixteen-year-old brother announces that he's leaving home to go live with a guru and become holy. How on earth are you supposed to go about the business of growing up in such a complicated family?

With My Family and Other Saints, Kirin Narayan shows us how. Her funny, touching memoir tells the story of her brother's quest and its effects, revealing a family full of love, yet always on the verge of disintegration. As their house becomes a waystation for the army of hippies, gurus, and charlatans flooding India, Narayan also brings late-60s Bombay to life, taking us back to a time and place when nearly everyone, it seemed, was embarked on some sort of spiritual quest and Western seekers were obsessed with all things Indian, from yoga to transcendental meditation. Deeply moving, yet frequently hilarious, My Family and Other Saints is a poignant reminder of both the power and the frailty of family bonds in turbulent times.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Literature | Press Releases | Religion
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Now available in paperback— With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in the age of information is not stuff but style. In such an age, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Literature | Press Releases
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Readers who denounce most contemporary French poetry as self-referential experimentation, word games, exercises in deconstruction, or other kinds of incomprehensible writing disconnected from everyday life—brace yourselves for a revelation. Erotic and urbane, distinguished by formal skill yet marked by the subtlest shades of feeling, Guy Goffette’s unabashedly lyrical poems pay homage to both Verlaine and Rimbaud, whom he counts as his important forbears, with echoes of Auden and Pound, Pavese and Borges.

Long known and admired in France, Guy Goffette’s Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition is the first English-language collection of his works. Poet and translator Marilyn Hacker’s crystalline, musical renderings will show Anglophones why this poet is considered one of the most important writing in French today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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In Search of Lost Time has enthralled lovers of literature for nearly a century. But for diehard fans, its seven volumes are never enough: Proust fans also devour biographies of this most enigmatic of writers, tap guidebooks to navigate his magnum opus, and even sponsor book clubs devoted to plumbing its considerable depths. Here National Book Award nominee Alice Kaplan offers Proust fans the gift they've long been waiting for: a crystalline translation of Madame Proust, the enthralling biography of Proust's mother.

Written by Evelyne Bloch-Dano and originally published in France to lavish critical acclaim, Madame Proust: A Biography explores how Marcel's mother both inspired and informed his legendary novel. Renowned both jokingly and lovingly as the quintessential mama's boy of all of modern literature, Proust was dramatically influenced by his mother, Jeanne Weil, and this intimate portrait of her life and times reveals precisely how, limning their unusually close bonds and the fin de siècle French milieu in which they lived.

Read the press release. Read a chapter from the book, “The Goodnight Kiss.”

Archived in Biography | Literature | Press Releases
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Our books are not often reviewed in Jordanian newspapers. In fact, we can't remember the last time. So it was a treat to see Joseph A. Massad's new book Desiring Arabs receiving some positive press in Monday's Jordan Times. Writer Sally Bland praises Massad's book for its detailed analysis of the influence of Western culture on Middle Eastern sexual mores through a comprehensive survey of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present. Bland writes:

The material reviewed by Massad is amazingly comprehensive, covering a time span of over a century and all major schools of thought from Arab nationalist to Marxist to Islamic. Their writings come in many forms and genres—academic, literary, journalistic and theological—and touch on many subjects related to sexuality, such as heritage, women's status, health issues and how state policy has dealt with "deviance."

Like Massad's two previous books, Desiring Arabs is meticulously researched and documented, using a broad spectrum of Arabic, English and French sources. Touching on so many disciplines as it does, the book inspires—or provokes—a radically new way of looking at human identity, culture and social behaviour, in part based on a more objective assessment of the past.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
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Stuart Dybek, currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University is one of twenty four academics to be awarded a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. Dybek, born and raised in the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods, is the author of several books of poetry and three short story collections. We re-printed his first collection of stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a short piece this morning giving more details about the award:

MacArthur fellows were called out of the blue and told they each will receive a $500,000 no-strings-attached grant over five years.

Dybek, 65, said the grant "couldn't have come at a better time." By freeing him from having to take side jobs, the money will give Dybek time to finish three books.… A book of poems set in the Caribbean, a collection of short stories set in Chicago and other places, and a memoir.

We can't wait to see more work from one of Chicago's best homegrown authors!

Find out more about Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods on the press website.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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The online literary magazine Bookslut is running a nice review of Evelyn Bloch-Dano's forthcoming book, Madame Proust: A Biography. The mother of one of the nineteenth century's most important novelists, Jeanne Weil Proust was a profound influence on her son's life and writing. But as Bookslut reviewer Aysha Somasundaram notes, Bloch-Dano's new book goes beyond the typical focus of most biographies to deliver a thorough account of the social and cultural milieu in which Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, was written. Somasundaram writes:

Meticulously researched, Madame Proust offers a socio-cultural portrait of French and Jewish culture and how each intersected in Proust's lifetime. It not only explores Anti-Semitism, assimilation and naturalization of Jewish French Nationals and the Dreyfus affair but also ably recreates the bourgeois milieu, familial and cultural context and the physical lay-out of the Paris in which Marcel Proust lived. Marcel Proust was the product of an arranged marriage between an affluent Jewish mother and upwardly mobile Catholic father.…

Bloch-Dano's biography offers a sensitive, delicate evocation of the relationship Proust would describe as his life's "only purpose, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation." Madame Proust is a well-conceived and insightful tribute to a woman who lived quietly and whose ambitions and hopes centered fixedly on her family's well-being and her son's fulfillment.

Read an excerpt, "The Goodnight Kiss".

The official publication date for Madame Proust: A Biography is October 1 of this year.

Archived in Biography | Literature | Reviews
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A review in the September 12 New York Sun focuses on author Vicki Hearne's (1946–2001) double life as an assistant professor of English at Yale and a "respected horse and dog trainer;" two worlds which Hearne brings together in an unusual and fascinating way with her newest work, posthumously published by the press, Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Louisa Thomas writes for the Sun:

Vicki Hearne was taken seriously in both the academy and in the kennels where she spent much of her time. But she was not wholly at home in either. As she wrote in her book Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name, "Dog trainers and philosophers can't make much sense of each other." The trainers talk about animals in anthropomorphized language, whereas philosophers tend to assume that only humans are truly moral creatures. Ms. Hearne spent much of her time trying to bridge the gap—to build off of what the philosophers say about consciousness and the trickeries of language, while vigorously defending the idea that animals are in on the game.

This is the task of her poetry as well as her prose. Ms. Hearne is less well known as a poet, but she is a skilled practitioner, and her subject is well-suited to verse. Her talent is plainly clear in her posthumous collection of new and selected poems, Tricks of the Light … edited by her longtime friend and champion, the critic and poet John Hollander.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Sun website.

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
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New York Times film critic A. O. Scott wrote a lovely article for last Sunday's paper about Francis Ford Coppola's forthcoming film adaptation of Youth Without Youth—a surreal, philosophy-driven novella by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)—the University of Chicago professor whose writings in the history of religions defined the field. Scott's article begins:

Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years, is about Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. Though Matei, played by Tim Roth, retains a septuagenarian's memories and experiences, his body, restored to 30-year-old fighting trim, is mysteriously immune to the effects of time.

The professor's condition is presented as a medical curiosity and a metaphysical conundrum—like the novella by Mircea Eliade on which it is based, Mr. Coppola's movie is a complex, symbol-laden meditation on the nature of chronology, language, and human identity—but it also speaks to a familiar and widespread longing. What if, without losing the hard-won wisdom of age, you could go back and start again? What if you could reverse and arrest the process of growing old, securing the double blessing of a full past and a limitless future?

Coinciding with the film's international premiere at the Rome Film Fest, the Press will be releasing the first paperback edition of Eliade's novel in late October featuring a new foreword by Coppola himself. The U. S. release of the film is scheduled for December. In the meantime you can find the official website for the film at http://www.ywyfilm.com/. You can also view a trailer at rottentomatoes.com.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature
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Eric Santner's new book On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, recently received an enthusiastic review by Ross Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement. Wilson's review begins:

What is life? What kind of beings are human beings? Despite their forbidding enormity, these questions have received sustained scrutiny in contemporary political theory, philosophy, literary theory, and criticism.… Eric L. Santner's fascinating, difficult book is a significant contribution to this attempt to specify what is human about human life and, indeed, what is meant by "life" to begin with.

Ross not only praises Santner's book as "the most urgently relevant sort of intellectual history" but explains its relation to the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and provides a lucid gloss of its main arguments:

"Creaturely life" is not simple biological life, then, but the "zero degree of social existence"; it is that minimum of human life, closest to animal life, which is caught up in the antagonisms of the political."

Two years ago we posted an essay by Santner that offered a highly topical rehearsal of these ideas—an account of Terry Schiavo and Abu Ghraib as "two faces of the state of exception in which political power takes a direct hold on human life."

As Ross notes in his review, Santner's new book not only extends his earlier work on political theology, but shows how the great novelist W. G. Sebald "in particular, and literature in general, are especially suited to documenting the nature of creaturely life."

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
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James Attlee's new book Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey received a positive review by Paul Kingsnorth in the Independent. Kingsnorth—an Oxford resident himself— writes:

Oxford's supposedly dreaming spires have been committed to print so often that you'd have thought there'd be nothing we don't know about the city now. Yet James Attlee shows otherwise with a book about the last part of Oxford that remains colorful, wild, unpredictable and, for the moment, untouched by the dead hand of "regeneration."…

Its subject, the Cowley Road, … is a ramshackle, multicultural mélange, the old track through the marshes between Oxford and Cowley village, now home to a mix of races and religions, strung with halal butchers, flotation centers, porn shops and pawn brokers, Chinese herbalists, Caribbean fishmongers, Russian grocers, pubs and mosques.… It's my neighborhood, and I thought I knew it pretty well. But Isolarion has made me think, not just about local history and the hidden everyday, but about religion and philosophy, democracy and social change.

More than a day trip, Kingsnorth notes in Isolarion "Attlee's aim is to make a pilgrimage: 'Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?'… Attlee captures the essence of this city better than any tour bus ever could."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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Last Friday's New York Times had a review of an exhibition at the SculptureCenter. The exhibition drew inspiration from a book that the Press recently honored, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images by W. J. T. Mitchell. Martha Schwendener writes for the NYT:

What do objects want? The question, immediately recalling Freud's about women, also paraphrases the title of W. J. T. Mitchell's book What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, the inspiration for an exhibition at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens.

Mr. Mitchell, a professor at the University of Chicago and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, observes that "modern, rational, secular" people don't generally treat pictures like persons, yet "we always seem to be willing to make exceptions for special cases." (Most of us, for instance, would be reluctant to poke out the eyes on a photograph of our mother.) But pictures have desires, too, he argues, and a primary one is the desire to capture our attention—to "transfix the beholder" and gain some measure of mastery or power over us.

The Happiness of Objects, organized by Sarina Basta, the SculptureCenter curator, takes Mr. Mitchell's ideas and tweaks them to fit an exhibition of work by nearly two dozen artists and artist collectives. Visitors receive a handout titled "The Object's Bill of Rights," which lays out a series of demands like "The Object has the right to be claimed or forgotten, lost or found," and "The Object has the right to many lovers."

You can learn more about the show at the SculptureCenter website, or check out Mitchell's fascinating book, either way, your understanding of our increasingly visual culture is guaranteed to be transformed.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Literature
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We're catching it a little late, but last month the London Review of Books ran such an interesting review of Richard Sher's The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America that we thought it worth a mention. Sher brings to light the forgotten role of the publishing industry on the explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland during the eighteenth century, as reviewer James Buchan—a Scotch writer himself—explains:

For Sher, whether a piece of paper was folded into four to make a big square volume (quarto) or eight like a modern hardback (octavo) or 12 like a livre de poche (duodecimo), who printed a book and who sold it and for how much, how many editions a book went through and how much money the author or publisher made, whether there were engravings, frontispieces or printed advertisements—all those have important things to tell us about works such as Hume's Essays and Treatises, his country and his age [and] as befits such an argument Sher's book is beautifully illustrated.

"Even among bibliographers and book historians who specialize in the 18th-century book trade," Sher writes, "relatively little work has been done to connect publishers and the conditions of publication with the authors and their books. One of the primary tasks of this book is to re-establish that connection." For Sher, the Scottish printers and booksellers of the second half of the century … were not 'mechanicks' … but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Reviews
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The May 9 Sydney Morning Herald includes an excellent review of James Attlee's new book, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey. Praising Attlee for his ability to transform a seemingly mundane trip down Oxford's Cowley Road—a side-street just minutes from the author's doorstep—into a fascinating travelogue of his adventures through the exotic and the extraordinary, reviewer Bruce Elder writes:

Having lived in south Oxfordshire for seven years in the 1970s I have traveled up and down Oxford's Cowley Road, which runs from Magdalen Bridge to the famous Morris car works, literally thousands of times. In all those journeys, not once did it occur to me that the rich diversity of cafes, shops, pubs, galleries and houses would be the suitable subject for a travel book. What a great idea. …

Part of the appeal of this remarkable book is the way each shop manages to fire the author's imagination. Thus a visit to a jeweller includes references to Shakespeare, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Petrarch and Charlemagne and the porn shop on the corner evokes Lucretius, St Jerome and even the Bible. Each experience opens up worlds of associations and slowly the street becomes the world. Attlee describes in meticulous detail each place—right down to the misspellings on the walls—and thus the book becomes a series of vignettes connected by the road. In this he echoes the style adopted by Bruce Chatwin in his groundbreaking travel book In Patagonia. The vignettes, like marks on a painting by a pointillist, eventually coalesce to become a beautiful work of art.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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At its award ceremony on Monday, April 30, the University of Chicago Press awarded the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize to W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, for his book What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images.

Awarded annually since 1963 by the Press, the Laing Prize is given to the Chicago faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the Press's list.

In What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell explores the idea that images are not just inert objects that convey meaning but animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. The book highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting.

Mitchell becomes only the third faculty member to win the Laing Prize twice; he also won the 1996 prize for Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.

What Do Pictures Want? was also the co-winner of the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Literature | UCP News
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John Patrick Diggins, author of Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire under Democracy—a fascinating biography of the preeminent American playwright Eugene O'Neill—recently published an essay adapted from his book in the May 4 Chronicle of Higher Education. Commenting on the broad applicability of O'Neill's plays to virtually all aspects of modern American life, Diggins writes:

O'Neill merits appreciation beyond the conventional categories of politics, the aesthetic criteria of dramaturgy, or the neurotic symptoms of psychology. Ideas pervade O'Neill's plays, and not only ideas central to drama like irony, pathos, and tragedy.… He considered fortuitous contingencies and unintended consequences; sympathy and pity; falls caused by pride or jealousy; social and political philosophy involving class, religion, gender, race, marriage and family, power and freedom, and money and status.

And as a recent review in the Library Journal notes, it is just this appreciation of the diverse thematic content in O'Neill's work that sets Diggins's biography apart.

Biographers have published dozens of books on Eugene O'Neill over the last 50 years in an attempt to explain the complexities of America's 20th-century 'master playwright.' What makes Diggins's thoroughly researched effort particularly effective is his use of political, philosophical, social, psychological, and religious themes in his discussion of O'Neill's life and plays in the context of a dynamic American society.… Diggins generously illustrates each theme with multiple examples from O'Neill's plays and correspondences. Particularly insightful are his comparisons of O'Neill's work with that of other great writers on the theme of American democracy, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Abraham Lincoln. This book offers the reader a lot to think about, regarding O'Neill's life and work but also American society at large.

Painting a richly detailed portrait of the playwright's life and work, Eugene O'Neill's America offers a striking view of America's greatest playwright—and an insightful picture of America itself.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Reviews
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Reviews of James Attlee's Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey have flooded the UK periodicals recently. Attlee's book is an engaging chronicle of his unusual pilgrimage down Oxford's Cowley Road—a bustling multi-ethnic side street not more than a few blocks from his own doorstep.

It's quite telling of the author's rhetorical prowess and insight that the his depiction of this decidedly lesser-known thoroughfare in his hometown has become such a a smash hit. Especially amongst so many of his fellow Brits who, before Attlee's book, probably never knew such a diamond in the rough existed, let alone right in their own back yards. (Or should that be "in their own gardens"? Or maybe "just beyond their gardens"?)

In the past ten days the book has received some outstanding reviews from the Times, the Financial Times, as well as the Spectator magazine. Here's a sampling of what the reviewers are saying:

“[Cowley Road] remains one of the last three Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life in it. For the time being, before the rents shoot up and the developers triumph, it is where you go for foreign fruit, halal meat, exotic dry goods, cheaper domestic wares, direct calls to Dakkar, the Authentic Flavour of Kurdistan and 17 other lands, and all the amenities floating in the wake of the immigration quinquireme. As well as the sex shops, the postcard and stamp specialist, the hard-shell socialism, the Honest Stationery, and the sound of Urdu, Bengali, Chunga Chunga (fidget freezin’ crazy breakin’ funkin’ beats), and of Imperial Leisure (supported by Random Character and Drunken Uncle Bungle); not forgetting Inflatable Buddha. As [James Attlee] asks, ‘Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?’”
Eric Christiansen Spectator

“[Reading Attlee’s book], I often found myself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute. How did we get on to this?’ But seldom in a spirit of irritation, because the writing is so good: dildos of varying sizes are racked against the wall in a sex shop ‘like Kalashnikovs for sale on an Afghan market stall.’ Attlee comes across as a charming daydreamer, with a mind ever open to serendipity: ‘I have a theory that the discarded newspaper often contains more interesting news than the one purchased in the normal way.’”
Andrew Martin Times

“Isolarion, despite its title, is about engagement. I want to hand out copies of this book to everyone who tells me that moving to a middle-class suburb would be ‘better’ for my inner-city children. Attlee shows the hidden beauty of the plural society: ‘To put it simply, this is what I love about the moment in history I inhabit.’”
Isabel Berwick Financial Times

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill’s plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now in Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A capstone to the career of a giant in Shakespearean scholarship, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now is the first book of its kind: an utterly accessible history of how the works of Shakespeare have been performed, from the Renaissance right up to the present—and even on the silver screen by such directors as Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Kenneth Branagh. The world’s leading expert on the subject, Bevington moves from the sparse stage sets of Elizabethan playhouses to the spectacular visual effects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions to the present, which has seen companies employ far more understated approaches, emphasizing character and language in a manner much closer to Shakespeare’s own aims. Bringing a lifetime of study to bear on a remarkably underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare's art, Bevington has crafted a book that will enthrall newcomers and aficionados alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another Chicago book has found its way into the New York Times, only this time it wasn't among the usual Sunday book reviews, instead it was hiding out in the travel section of the paper. Reviewing Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, for the NYT's "Armchair Traveler" column, Richard B. Woodward gives a nice account of the making of James Attlee's unconventional new travelogue:

Stricken with ennui during commutes to his publishing job in London, [Attlee] was tempted to set out on an adventure far outside cellphone range of his wife and children. Instead, he put his tape recorder in his pocket, walked out the front door, and embarked on a voyage around his Oxford neighborhood.

"Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you," he reasons. Recording not the hallowed academic haven of dreaming spires, but the more recent and fractious multicultural city, he decides that this less venerated England is best seen on Cowley Road, an ancient thoroughfare that once led pilgrims from the colleges to a medieval healing well, and is now home to immigrants from five continents.

As a document of the author's fascinating journey, Isolarion takes its readers down one of the lesser known back streets of Oxford, a place just minutes from Attlee's own home, but one that he reveals to be just as exciting and full of surprises as a trip around the world.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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David Bevington's new book This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now was recently noted by the New York Times' William Grimes in his comprehensive review of "a stack of Shakespeare books released to coincide with the playwright's birthday on April 23." Though Bevington's book is set amongst some tough competition, as Grimes notes, his book stands out for its detailed study of the performance of Shakespeare's plays. Grimes writes:

Mr. Bevington, by focusing on the stage directions in Shakespeare's plays, shows how actors relied on words alone to suggest time, place and action, and how the stage at the Globe could be manipulated in the hands of a canny playwright. There was no balcony in "Romeo and Juliet." On the other hand, since there was nothing in the way of stage décor, no intervals were needed to move from scene to scene. More recent directors, returning to Shakespeare's idea of staging, have embraced abstract spaces and let the language do the work.

Examining the performance of Shakespeare's art both in his own time and in the succeeding centuries, David Bevington's This Wide and Universal Theater is an essential addition to any Shakespeare lover's bookshelf.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the UK comes another review of Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey by James Attlee, this one in the Times. The review praises Attlee's unconventional travelogue for turning his observations about Oxford's Cowley Road—an unexplored side-street just minutes from the author's home—into a fascinating journey across space and time. From Elizabeth Garner's review:

On the surface, Isolarion plays with the thrill of voyeurism. We follow Attlee behind closed doors into unknown worlds: from New Age immersion in a flotation tank to the brash neon-lit world of the porn shop, to the smoky, hypnotic experience of a reggae concert. …

But Isolarion is more than a piece of observational journalism. Attlee's encounters lead to thoughtful investigations of the human condition. A visit to a jewellers allows a digression on love and love tokens. A vivid, sensual description of a street carnival becomes an insight into multiculturalism, and blends into a meditation on the nature of family. …

Ultimately, [Attlee] weaves together a subtle, understated tale of spiritual survival: peace and understanding come from an investigation of where we are. In an age in which air travel opens up the world, and holidays are to escape the mundane, Attlee encourages us to look at the riches on our doorstep.

Another piece about Attlee and Isolarion was published in the Oxford Times.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is it possible to travel without leaving home? Is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving your life behind? James Attlee answers that question in this thoughtful, savvy, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that's what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road's appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops abut craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Press Releases
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Author James Attlee was interviewed by Danny Cox of BBC Radio Oxford on the occasion of the 2007 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. Attlee discussed his book Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey. You can listen to archived audio (RealMedia format) of the interview.

In Isolarion Attlee delivers a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Though a lesser known local on Oxford's lower east side, Attlee reveals Cowley to be a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood. In his interview Attlee expands on that notion by focusing on his account of the Cowley Road as a story not only about this quaint Oxford neighborhood, but a more universal tale of modern cities generally.

We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Events | Literature
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James Attlee's Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey has been getting some great press lately. The latest review of this unconventional travelogue of the author's sojourn on Oxford's Cowley Road appears in the April/May issue of Bookforum. Rebecca Mead, staff writer at the New Yorker—and a former Oxford resident—writes:

The Cowley Road…is also home to Attlee, and it is the governing conceit of Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey that an intellectually curious and personally inquisitive voyager might travel through his own neighborhood in a manner as revelatory as that of any pilgrim to foreign lands. The fish-out-of-water travelogue is a staple of the bookstore, but Attlee, a father of young children, with a job in London to which he commutes daily, has set himself a different task: to be the fish and to give a detailed description of the properties of the water. …

I was surprised, on reading this book … how much I missed while whistling down the street on my bike on my way to the library. But Attlee's reading, unlike that of a student cramming to prepare this week's essay, is deep and wide and engagingly circuitous.

Isolarion, Mead concludes, "reveals how a book about a road can end up being a book about everything else as well."

Grab a copy of the print version of Bookforum to check out the rest of the review. In the meantime you can read an excerpt from the book on our website.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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An appreciative review of James Attlee's new book, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, is in yesterday's Economist. The review praises Attlee's literary sojourn along Cowley Road in Oxford saying:

James Attlee’s scholarly, reflective, and sympathetic journey up the Cowley Road is one of the best travel books that has been written about Britain’s oldest university city. It is not—at least not directly—the Oxford of punts and gowns. His raw material is diversity: the Cowley Road as a corner of the outside world, where change and excitement are squeezed into the cramped hinterland of the scholarly theme park of the city centre. …

Isolarion, named after a detail on a medieval map, is unsparing, but not bleak. It blends humour and passion… [into] a vivid account of daily life, fluid and unsettling, in a modern British town with powerful allegorical reflections on the connections between past and present, time and space, and high culture and the hard scrabble world that sustains it. Oxford may be the city of lost causes, and this book is indeed ambitious; it could easily sound sententious or twee. But it works, gloriously.

We have an excerpt from Isolarion. The excerpt is the chapter titled "Further Purification of the Pilgrim," in which Attlee experiences ritual immersion at the Eau-de-Vie Flotation Centre.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
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Last year we published Anthony C. Yu's The Monkey and the Monk, his abridged translation of Hsi-yu Chi, a renowned classic of Chinese literature. The Monkey and the Monk chronicles the adventures of Xuanzang, a seventh-century monk, over the course of his sixteen-year journey in search of Buddhist scriptures. Rich with allegory, humor, fantasy, and satire, the book is an exciting foray into the Hsi-yu Chi and the ancient Chinese world.

But even at 528 pages The Monkey and the Monk is but a distillation of a larger project Yu began over thirty years ago to create a full English translation of this ancient Chinese epic.
Yu's Journey to the West is a four-volume translation of the complete Hsi-yu Chi—the only English translation available. We published the four volumes between 1977 and 1983. Now Yu will have the opportunity to revisit and revise his translation, thanks to a $55,000 award from the Mellon Foundation. An article in the University of Chicago's Chronicle details the award saying:

In 1984, Yu was awarded the Gordon J. Laing Prize from the University Press for his four-volume translation of The Journey to the West, the first complete version in English. The Mellon fellowship will support a thorough revision of that translation, featuring the conversion into the now standard Romanization of Chinese characters, a new scholarly introduction and updated annotations.

The Mellon support will enable Yu to reconcile the old full-length edition with the format, style and scholarly substance with the new abridgment.

Professor Yu's work has already contributed immensely to the West's understanding of ancient Chinese culture. With a Mellon grant to bolster his new revisions, Journey to the West will remain an unsurpassed achievement.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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Ruth Fredman Cernea, editor of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, was interviewed in the February 20 edition of the Jewish Ledger, a Connecticut weekly. In her conversation with staff writer Judie Jacobson, Cernea talks about the genesis of the University of Chicago's famous Latke-Hamantash debates, some of its notable participants, and the meaning—or lack thereof—in its annual deliberations. From the interview in the Ledger:

Q: When and why did the debate get started?

A: It began more than 60 years ago as an inspired "lark" by three people at the University of Chicago—Professor Sol Tax, an anthropologist; Professor Louis Gottshalk, a historian, and Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky. They were worried about the intellectual and social climate at the university for the numerous Jewish faculty and students there. This was a time when it was not professionally advisable to advertise your ethnic background on campus, when being an objective scientist meant burying the "yid" inside. In fact, many of the faculty had been brought up in homes rich in Eastern European Jewish culture: they knew Yiddish, ate the traditional East European foods, and went to "cheder." In another world they might have become Talmudists. …

The Tax-Gottshalk-Perkarsky spur-of-the-moment idea? A shmooze in the Hillel house, with faculty arguing the merits of familiar traditional foods, just before winter break. It would be a haven in the midst of the Christmas carols on campus. Sol Tax would make latkes. Faculty would let their hair down and speak the in-group vernacular of their childhood homes, Yiddish, and students would experience these forbidding figures as approachable, whole human beings.

Q:Who are some of the people who've participated in the Latke-Hamantash Debate?

A: It's almost easier to list who has not! The book includes papers by two Nobel Prize winners, Milton Friedman and Leon Lederberg; three university presidents, former Chicago President Hanna Grey, former Princeton University President Harold Shapiro, and Barnard's current President Judith Shapiro; and key people from a wide range of academic disciplines. Considering that it takes significant effort to produce an academic paper, spoof or not, it's noteworthy that such serious scholars took the time to write and joke about their lives and their life's work.

Our online feature for the book includes the text and audio of Ted Cohen’s “Consolations of the Latke” as well as recipes for both the immortal pancake and the equally worthy pastry. With Purim about two weeks away, there's still time to learn to make hamantashen.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Literature | Religion
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